Glossing Guide for Hebrew

The primary purpose of these interlinears is to produce a data set that can function as a reader’s Hebrew or Greek Bible. This means that it will function as training wheels for intermediate students who need to read larger portions of biblical text, since this is the best way to grow in fluency. The student needs to be able to read narrative portions of Scripture in the original without feeling too discouraged or losing momentum in the reading process. A reader’s Bible helps by providing quick and convenient meaning whenever the student encounters a word they’ve forgotten or are unfamiliar with. This meaning should:

1. be concise

2. require minimal mental processing

3. reflect the Hebrew as closely as possible

An interlinear is not a translation. This is important to keep in mind. We are not trying to obscure the way Hebrew says something in order to make it more smooth or idiomatic in the target language (which is the role of a translation). In other words, we are trying to help the student understand how Hebrew expresses ideas on its own terms, even if the glosses sound strange or awkward in the target language.

As students are reading, it should always be assumed that they will have access to a proper translation in their language, which will fulfill the role of helping them figure out how to put all the pieces together if they can’t do so on their own. For example, if the Hebrew says, “And it was hot to Cain very,” (וַיִּחַר לְקַיִן מְאֹד) and the student struggles to make sense of that phrase, a translation will usually do that by saying, “And Cain was very angry.” That’s the function of a translation, but the function of an interlinear is to make the Hebrew words, forms, and expressions as transparent as possible as they are in their original form.

Keep in mind that the English interlinear that we’re currently using as a reference (which Google Translate uses as a source text to fill in suggestions) is sometimes a poor example and goes against some of the standards listed below. It should never be taken as a perfect standard to be followed, but rather as an imperfect reference that may often be correct.

It’s important to avoid tools online that give Modern Hebrew word meanings. A Google search or Wikipedia article may often give meanings of words as they are understood today in Modern Israeli Hebrew, rather than how they are understood in Biblical Hebrew. Please keep this distinction in mind. Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew are very different languages, and many of the same words have completely different meanings.

If you’re a perfectionist, there might be a temptation to spend too much time searching for the perfect translation gloss of a word, imagining that the entire truth of God’s word depends on what gloss you choose. This is unnecessary. The key is to find a reasonable balance between speed and accuracy. We don't want these glosses to take decades to finish. At the same time we don't want them to be sloppy. Keep in mind that students and other users will be able to compare translations if they want, and they are not expected to depend on your gloss for a full understanding of a word or passage. That’s the role of a lexicon or commentary or biblical encyclopedia.

Your choice of a gloss merely has to help the reader get quick information. If they want to do a word study and look it up in a lexicon, they can do that. But it's not your job to cover that nuance and complexity in a gloss. 

The following list is the order of priority we will use to work on books based on ease of reading for beginning students. This is not a strict list by any means. If someone is passionate about translating a certain book outside of this order, that’s completely fine. This is simply a basic template to help people know where to start and guide them as they progress.

1. Jonah

2. Ruth

3. Genesis

4. Exodus

5. Joshua

6. Judges

7. 1 Samuel

8. 2 Samuel

9. 1 Kings

10. 2 Kings

11. Esther

12. Nehemiah

13. Ezra

14. Leviticus

15. Numbers

16. Deuteronomy

17. 1 Chronicles

18. 2 Chronicles

19. Lamentations

20. Psalms

21. Proverbs

22. Ecclesiastes

23. Isaiah

24. Jeremiah

25. Ezekiel

26. The Twelve Minor Prophets

27. Song of Songs

28. Job

If multiple people are contributing to a project:

1. Read at least one chapter of the work already done on a previous book if there has already been work completed by someone else. For example, if you’re joining the project after some work has already been done, such as the book of Jonah, read through at least one chapter of that work and observe carefully how the contributor glossed and made decisions.

2. Avoid two people working on the same book at the same time. If this is necessary, make sure to clearly agree on which chapters of the book each person will be responsible for so that there aren’t clashes while working.

3. Encourage one another. And when someone stops working or hasn’t been heard from in a while, check in with them and see how they’re doing and ask how you can pray for them.

4. Form a group on Whatsapp or another platform for easier communication and asking each other questions.

5. Check one another’s work for accuracy and quality. Politely and graciously point out where one another’s work can be improved, and be ready to humbly accept suggestions.

A word should always be translated/glossed with the meaning it carries within the context of the verse. For example, the verb אָץ in many passages means “he hastened” but in the context of Joshua 17:15 it means “it was narrow.” It would be very unhelpful to the student to gloss אָץ as “it hastened” in Joshua 17:15 because the verse wouldn’t make sense. Most words have a range of meaning, and it’s your job to put the proper meaning in the gloss, depending on the context. The lexicon tool in the interface (click a Hebrew word to make the lexicon appear) will give you the different meanings that come up in different contexts. The lexicon will often be your best friend in this work, so take your time to get to know it well.

Because this interlinear is not a translation, no punctuation is necessary. This is important because when punctuation (such as commas) is included in glosses, the machine will take that gloss and automatically populate other instances of the same word with that gloss, even if the comma isn’t appropriate in those other contexts. We want to avoid that. This includes avoiding quotation marks, periods, exclamation points, colons, semicolons, question marks, etc.

Not all languages communicate definiteness in the same way. If your target language doesn’t use a definite article like Hebrew does (-הַ) then you don’t have to supply a gloss for it. The intermediate student of Hebrew should already know what the function of הַ is in Hebrew. Remember, that the purpose of the interlinear is not to provide information for people who have zero knowledge of Hebrew. It’s a data set meant to help people who understand the basics get better at reading and studying the Hebrew Bible.

In English and other languages sentences begin with an uppercase/capital letter. For the purposes of this interlinear, we will not follow this convention because we are not creating a translation. If we gloss a word with a capital letter, this will mess up the predictive feature of the machine by populating the same gloss in other places with a capital letter when it’s not at the beginning of a sentence. Please avoid using uppercase at the beginning of sentences/verses.

The first letter of proper names should be capitalized if this is the normal convention of the target language, such as Adam or Jesus.

The name of God, Yahweh, should be rendered either as four capital letters (in Spanish it is YHVH, but the English standard is YHWH), or as most people usually write it out in academic books or Bible translations. Avoid putting the equivalent of “LORD” or “GOD” as a gloss for יהוה. If your target language has no standard besides a title like LORD, then please transliterate something similar to Yahweh or simply put the four equivalent letters to YHWH or YHVH. If your target language tradition still uses something like Jehovah, that’s fine to use.

When verbs in a target language are ambiguous as to the subject or gender, etc., it’s best to make these things explicit in the gloss. For example, in Exodus 1:1 we have the verb בָּֽאוּ “they came.” If we were translating (not glossing) this verse in English, we would not make the subject “they” explicit, but rather just use “came”: “These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt.” If we wrote, “who they came to Egypt,” that would be bad English.

Many times in the Psalms and other poetry books you will encounter verbs that might normally be translated as past (vayyiqtol/vav-consecutive-imperfect or qatal/perfect verbs), but you find them translated as future or present in your favorite Bible version in your language. Then you will find the opposite, where yiqtol/imperfect verbs are translated as present or even past. This dilemma has plagued translators for centuries, and no one is in agreement on one way to deal with it. But because this interlinear is not a translation, it doesn’t matter. Simply be consistent.

Notice that, although בְּנוֹת doesn’t have the definite article in Hebrew, its relationship to a proper noun in the construct phrase gives it that definiteness. So this feature of the Hebrew should be represented in the glosses of languages that have definite articles.

If something is obviously implicit in Hebrew and necessary for the intermediate student to make sense of the sentence, then it can be added in square brackets []. This may be a to-be verb, such as [was] when it’s not obvious from context, or perhaps a conjunction like [and] when it’s in a poem like Psalm 6:10. Brackets should be used as rarely as possible, and should not be used for adding interpretations/alternative meanings. 

An example of where brackets should not be used is found in Exodus 2:1: וַיִּקַּח אֶת־בַּת־לֵוִי The English interlinear from Bible Hub has this: 

The brackets with “as wife” are not necessary because they are fulfilling the role of a translation, which students can reference if they need to.
A better gloss would be: and he took    a daughter    of Levi

Sometimes there will be passages that are very difficult to interpret, and scholars may be divided on how to understand certain words. There may be several ways to gloss a word in a certain context. Your job is not to solve these problems or to provide the student with all the possible ways something may be glossed or understood. Instead, your job is only to supply one option in the target language for the student–an option that is accurate in the context of the verse. If students wish to investigate the issue further, they are free to do that with other tools. But the interlinear should not be expected to fill the role of a lexicon or a commentary.

An example of excessive and erroneous literalism would be glossing אֱלֹהִים as “Gods” when it clearly refers to “God” in the context. It’s true that אֱלֹהִים looks plural in form, but it would be an error to gloss it as plural in many contexts because that is not how Hebrew speakers understood the word when used as a title for Yahweh. The meaning of a word often transcends its morphology. For example, in English, it would be a mistake to gloss “butterfly” as a combination of the word “butter” and “fly.” While it’s absolutely true that the word butterfly has both of those elements, it is completely irrelevant to the word’s meaning.

If you think something else should be addressed in this document, please write to [email protected]. We expect many more issues and examples to come up as more languages get involved and face particular clashes between the way their language works and the way Hebrew works.