Customer Reviews

A Simplified Guide to Bhs: Critical Apparatus, Masora, Accents, Unusual Letters & Other Markings

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For those just beginning to work with the Hebrew Bible, this little guide can be very valuable. There is much in BHS that needs explaining, but is missing or difficult to comprehend in the front matter of BHS itself. The material in Scott's book is available in more substantial reference books on the Masorah ("The Masorah of BHS" by Kelley et al.) or textual criticism (see "Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible," by Emmanuel Tov), but these books are considerably larger and more expensive. The latter may be particularly difficult for beginners. As a quick and easy handbook for navigating BHS, Scott's book is very useful.

The "quick and dirty" of the stranger markings of BHS. For those not well-versed in Latin, German, or Aramaic, this little reference is quite handy. Scott does not bother with the history or evolution of the Tiberian Masorah or other markings, but rather simply gives what is necessary to successfully derive meaning from both the Masorah Magna and Masora Parva (but not the Masorah Finalis) as well as some of the accentation and other markings. The most useful feature of this reference work is its size - it's very small and slim, so much so that it may have a propensity to get lost frequently.

If one is interested in decoding the minutia around the BHS text, then this book is an invaluable resource to have available.

Upon careful reading, I found the explanation of the accents in this volume to be adequate, especially when applied directly to individual verses in the BHS.

Dimension in milimeters: 133 x 190 x 5
8 + 88 pages, summed to 96 pages total.
paperback.
Simple and brief(really brief) guide for you travelers into the mysterious marks blotted around the BHS text. Methinks the more you dig up at BHS, the more helpful this pamphlet(rather than a book) would look. :)

This text has good and bad points. It's translation of terms in the back, the background information on text pointing, and the briefer listing and explanation of the MS accent system is probably less overwhelming than other such references. But in the end, one would purchase this overpriced book with the purpose of learning the uses of the accents in Hebrew pointed text. The book comes up way short.

After giving some specific information on certain common disjunctive accents, it then shows the rest of the disjunctive accents with little or no explanation as to what they are doing in the text. The conjunctive accents are listed separately with no explanation whatsoever as to how they work. And two of the most common text pointings found in the Hebrew Bible are missing! I've never found memorizing symbols without explanations to be of any help in anything.

One should just pay a little more money and buy a reference which gives all the accents and explains their uses. As it is, my copy of this book has told me virtually nothing that I hadn't already learned in the two Hebrew grammars/ workbooks I've used to learn Hebrew.

Invest your money elsewhere than in this book.

This guide was an optional reading material for one of my BH classes. At first I wasn't sure what to make of this guide, how to use it and what its usefulness is. It isn't necessary for reading Biblical Hebrew and won't do you any good if that's all you want to do. But it's useful for folks who want to go beyond the text itself. The more I read BHS and the more I use the Masoretic notes and the critical apparatus, the more useful this little book becomes. Also, for an interested reader, there is a pretty good bibliography so one can dig deeper if desired.

Specifically, it covers verse divisions (soph pasuq, seder, etc.), special pointing, the Masora (it has brief notes on the Masoretes, Masora Finalis, Masora Marginalis -- both Mm and Mp, explanation of the critical apparatus and accents. In addition, there is an index of abbreviations and symbols in Mp and a useful list of Latin words used in BHS with English translations. For the price this is a good buy and certainly a useful tool for the interested reader.

Book is useful, but the 4th Edition does not have a guide to the Latin abbreviations, which I find crucial to understanding the text notes. The 3rd Edition had a key, but for some reason the editors thought it was ok to take it out. It's been a long time since I've taken Latin. Hebrew is difficult enough. Hopefully the 5th Edition will include the much needed guide.

You can see, from the dimension I presented below, that it's of the same width and height as Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia(Small Size). To make a jacket for the BHS and this booklet would be a good idea to keep them together.

This book was required reading for class. It served its educational purpose for the class. The professor highly recommended it to anyone need learn this subject.

Scott's "Simplified Guide to BHS" is invaluable to any student of text criticism, especially concerning accents and the small masora. However, the edition you are likely to end up purchasing is the most recent 4th edition which lacks Rüger's "Key". The "Key" was the most indispensable portion of the book and can be found in the 5th (and most recent) edition of BHS. So, don't buy this book if you are looking for Rüger's "Key".