Monday, May 23, 2005

Preaching resource: Online interlinears

While most of the posts on this blog are written for all Christians, it seems appropriate to include some entries specifically for preachers. But, as I hope you'll find in today's post, other Christians can benefit from many of these resources as well.

Interlinear Bibles feature the original biblical languages (Hebrew or Greek) along with literal English translations between the lines. I've investigated several online interlinears, and here are a few you might want to check out.

The Scripture Resources section on this page features both Old Testament (OT) and and New Testament (NT) interlinears from Scripture 4all. The NT interlinear is interesting in that its Greek is written like the original NT manuscripts: in capital letters (uncials) without accents or breathing marks (For Greek scholars, the text is the 1881 Westcott-Hort with NA26/27 variants). In addition to Greek and English lines, there is a line where each word is grammatically parsed. The OT interlinear (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) is annoying in that the editors have made the Hebrew sentences read left-to-right while the letters within the words remain right-to-left. The vowels are without pointings.

If you do want accents, breathing marks, and pointings in your Greek and Hebrew texts, you might want to look at Crosswalk's interlinear. Strictly speaking, it's not really an interlinear because it lines up English with Hebrew or Greek verse-for-verse rather than word-for-word. On the positive side, each word is hotlinked to fairly thorough lexical information.

Heartlight's Search God's Word has another useful interlinear that allows you to search by verse and select which original language text you want to use (BHS or LXX for the OT and NA26, 1894 TR, and 1991 Byzantine for the NT).

So, I hope you've enjoyed today's preaching resource. Coming tomorrow: A site full of expository sermon texts.

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