Reading Right to Left in an Interlinear

Psalm 119 is an alphabet poem, as Module 1 showed you: twenty-two stanzas of eight lines, each stanza using one letter of the Hebrew alphabet to begin every line. Verse 18 sits in the third stanza, the stanza of gimel, and in the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), the free electronic copy of the oldest complete Hebrew Bible that this track quotes, it begins with that letter: גַּל־עֵינַי (gal-einai, uncover my eyes). The whole verse is only five Hebrew words: גַּל־עֵינַי וְאַבִּיטָה נִפְלָאוֹת מִתּוֹרָתֶךָ (gal-einai ve'abbitah nifla'ot mittoratekha, uncover my eyes, that I may look at wonders from your law).

The Koine Greek track used this verse to open its lesson on Strong's numbers and lexicons, and if you have taken that track you have already met the point it made: the psalmist has the law in front of him and does not ask for more of it. He asks for sight. The verb גַּל (gal, uncover) is the word for drawing back a covering so that something already there can be seen. The wonders are in the text. What is covered is the reader. That is the right posture for a student about to be handed powerful tools, and it is worth beginning every study session in this track with the psalmist's prayer, and meaning it.

This lesson does not repeat what the Greek track taught about interlinears in general. If you have not read the Koine Greek lesson Using an Interlinear, read its first and fourth sections, which explain what an interlinear is, the difference between a true interlinear and a reverse interlinear, and why a gloss is not a meaning. Everything said there holds for Hebrew. What follows is what is different when the original language is Hebrew, and there is more that is different than most students expect.

Notice too where the psalmist stands when he prays this. The stanza around verse 18 is not written from a quiet study. He calls himself a stranger on the earth (119:19); rulers sit and slander him (119:23); he asks God to remove scorn and contempt (119:22). In that setting, his testimonies are his delight and his counselors (119:24). A pastor who opens the Hebrew of this verse on a cracked phone screen, late at night, under pressure, is in better company than he thinks.

The first difference is direction. Hebrew is written from right to left, so the first word of Psalm 119:18 is the one at the right-hand end of the line. When a tool prints a whole Hebrew verse across the screen, read it from the right. When a tool lays the words out one to a row, down the page, the direction no longer shows, and you must check whether the rows are in Hebrew order or rearranged into the order of an English translation. Both tools can do either, and both are useful, but a student who forgets which he is looking at will misread the order of the sentence.

The second difference is that a Hebrew word is often several English words. Hebrew joins small words to the front of a word and pronoun endings to the back. The common prefixes are וְ (ve, and), בְּ (be, in or with), לְ (le, to or for), כְּ (ke, like), מִ (mi, from, a shortened form of the word מִן, min) and הַ (ha, the). The common endings mean my, your, his, her, our and their. So מִתּוֹרָתֶךָ (mittoratekha) is three pieces: מִ (mi, from), תּוֹרָת (torat, law of) and ךָ (kha, your). Blue Letter Bible prints such a word as one unit and gives it one row. STEP Bible's Hebrew text splits it into its pieces and labels each one. Neither is wrong. The Hebrew scribes wrote it as one word, and a grammarian treats it as three.

The third difference concerns the text itself. In the Greek track you had to choose between Greek texts and check which one your screen was showing. For the Hebrew Old Testament the free tools nearly all show the same text, the Leningrad Codex, copied in about AD 1008 and now kept in St Petersburg, in its electronic form as the WLC. Blue Letter Bible labels its Hebrew text WLC, the electronic text maintained by the J. Alan Groves Center, formerly the Westminster Hebrew Institute. STEP Bible's main tagged Hebrew text, which it calls THOT (Translators Hebrew Old Testament), is also built on the Leningrad Codex. That uniformity is a convenience, and it hides something. The Old Testament has other witnesses, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint among them, and lesson 4 of this module shows you where translations follow them. Module 8 of this track takes the subject further.

The fourth difference is the marks around the letters. The consonants of the Hebrew Bible are ancient. The vowel points under and over them, and the accent marks that tell a reader how to chant the verse, were added by Jewish scholars called the Masoretes, mostly between the seventh and tenth centuries AD, to fix in writing a reading tradition that was much older. Module 1 explained this. On a phone the extra marks can make the Hebrew hard to read, and Blue Letter Bible lets you switch them on and off: look above its Hebrew interlinear for options to show or hide the vowel points and the cantillation marks, the chanting accents. While you are learning, show the vowels and hide the cantillation.

The fifth difference is verse numbers. In the Psalms, Hebrew Bibles count a psalm's title as verse 1, or as verses 1 and 2, where English Bibles fold the title into the first verse. So the BSB's Psalm 51:1, 'Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your loving devotion', is Psalm 51:3 in a Hebrew Bible. There are other differences: the BSB's Joel 2:28 is Joel 3:1 in Hebrew, and the BSB's Malachi 4 is the end of Malachi 3 in Hebrew. The free tools usually convert to English numbering for you, but commentaries and grammars that cite the Hebrew text may not. When a reference seems to point to the wrong verse, check the numbering before you check anything else.

Websites change their menus, so the steps below describe what to look for rather than promising exact labels. If a label has moved, look for the thing described.

On Blue Letter Bible, in the app or at blueletterbible.org in your phone's browser, search for Psalm 119:18 in the KJV. Beside the verse you will find a Tools button. Tap it, and among the tabs that open choose Interlinear. For an Old Testament verse the panel is headed Masoretic Text, and it shows the whole verse in Hebrew at the top with the options for vowel points and cantillation. Below it is a row of buttons that change the arrangement, including one that shows the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, and others that switch between the order of the English translation and the order of the Hebrew. Then comes a table, one Hebrew word to a row, with four columns: the English words of your translation that this Hebrew word lies behind; its Strong's number; the Hebrew word as it stands in the verse, its root or dictionary form underneath, and a transliteration; and a short coloured code giving its grammar. Tap the code and a panel opens that spells it out: part of speech, stem, form, person, gender and number. There is also a small speaker button that plays the word aloud.

On STEP Bible, at stepbible.org in your phone's browser, type Psalm 119:18 into the search box and choose THOT from the list of versions. Add the BSB as a second version if you want the English beside it. STEP prints the Hebrew right to left, divided into its pieces, with a short grammar label under each piece, such as Noun, Suffix, Preposition or Verb. Tap any piece and a side panel opens with the dictionary form, a transliteration, a short gloss, an extended Strong's number, how many times the word occurs, a numbered outline of its meanings, and a Grammar section that spells out the form in plain words. When the word is a verb, the panel prints the meanings that belong to the stem used in your verse in bold, which saves you from reading the wrong part of a long entry.

Do this now with Psalm 119:18 and keep the screen open. If you have no data at the moment, copy the five Hebrew words from section 1 of this lesson into your notebook, right to left, and come back to the tools later.

The first word is גַּל (gal, uncover). Both tools give its dictionary form as גָּלָה (galah), Strong's H1540, and label it a command addressed to one man. It is a short form, with the last letter of the root dropped, which is why the word on the screen and the word in the root column look different. Lesson 3 of this module explains the grammar label in full. The same root is used for uncovering, revealing and, in other passages, for going into exile, which is one reason STEP gives it an extended number with a letter after it: STEP splits some of Strong's numbers so that different senses or different words with the same spelling are kept apart.

The second word is עֵינַי (einai, my eyes), joined to the first by a short stroke at the top of the line called a maqqef, which ties two Hebrew words together so that they are read with one accent. The ending -ai is a dual form plus my: Hebrew has a special form for things that come in pairs, eyes, ears, hands and feet among them. Blue Letter Bible gives the word one row, glossed 'mine eyes' from the KJV. STEP splits it into עֵינַ (eyes) and י (my).

The third word is וְאַבִּיטָה (ve'abbitah, and let me look). The וְ (ve) is the ordinary word for and. The verb comes from the root נבט (n-b-t), to look or gaze, Strong's H5027, and its form is first person, I, with an extra ה (h) on the end that marks a wish or resolve: let me look. Here is a point no interlinear will tell you unless you know to ask. When a command is followed by and plus a let-me verb, Hebrew is very often expressing purpose: open my eyes, and let me look, means open my eyes so that I may look. That is why the BSB prints 'that I may see' and why there is no Hebrew word behind 'that'. The translators did not add an idea; they turned a Hebrew construction into its natural English equivalent.

The fourth word is נִפְלָאוֹת (nifla'ot, wonders, wondrous things), from the root פלא (p-l-'), Strong's H6381. Grammatically it is a feminine plural participle, a verb form used here as a noun, so the code on Blue Letter Bible will begin with V for verb even though the English is a noun. Follow it through the concordance and you will find it among the great acts of God: the plagues and the exodus, the crossing of the Jordan, the psalms that retell Israel's story. The psalmist is not asking to find curiosities in the law. He is asking to see in a written text the same hand that split the sea.

The fifth word is מִתּוֹרָתֶךָ (mittoratekha, from your law). The noun is תּוֹרָה (torah), Strong's H8451, which the BSB translates 'law' here and which means instruction, teaching or direction as well as law. On Blue Letter Bible look for the code that shows three parts joined by slashes, a preposition, a noun and a suffix. So five Hebrew words, twelve English words, and nothing lost or added: every English word is carrying something the Hebrew carries, even the ones with no Hebrew word of their own.

Everything the Greek track said about interlinears hiding grammar, editors and the difference between a gloss and a meaning applies here. Hebrew adds some traps of its own, and it is worth knowing them before you preach from a screen.

First, some English words have no Hebrew word behind them, and that is not a sign of a loose translation. Hebrew often has no word for is: Psalm 23:1 in the WLC is יְהוָה רֹעִי (YHWH ro'i, the LORD my shepherd), and English must supply is. Hebrew has no separate word for of in a phrase like the law of the LORD; the relationship is shown by the form and position of the first noun, a construction that Module 3 calls the construct chain. And as you saw in Psalm 119:18, Hebrew can express purpose without a word for that. A student who looks at the interlinear and says the word 'is' is not in the original has told his congregation something true and misleading.

Second, some Hebrew words have no English word under them. The most common is אֵת (et), the marker of a definite direct object, which tells the reader which word is receiving the action. It appears thousands of times and is never translated, because English shows the object by word order. You will see it in the interlinear with an empty English column or a dash. Do not read anything into it. There is a popular claim that because its two letters are the first and last letters of the alphabet it carries a hidden meaning about the beginning and the end. That is not how the word works, and lesson 5 of this module explains why that kind of claim should never reach a pulpit.

Third, the transliteration on your screen will not match the one in this lesson. Blue Letter Bible uses a scholarly system with marks over and under the letters, so that the root of the verb in Ezra 7:10 appears as dāraš; STEP uses another; this track uses a simple one without marks. None of them is the real pronunciation. They are ways of writing Hebrew in English letters, and they differ because they serve different readers. Learn to read the Hebrew letters, as Module 1 taught you, and the transliterations will stop mattering.

Fourth, the English line on Blue Letter Bible comes from the translation you opened, usually the KJV. Psalm 119:18 in the KJV reads, 'Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.' The interlinear will gloss וְאַבִּיטָה as 'that I may behold', because that is how the KJV put it, and the table will look as though the Hebrew has a word for that. It does not. The interlinear is a translation cut into pieces, and it carries that translation's choices. Look at the root column and the grammar code, not only at the English.

So keep the rule from the Greek track and add one Hebrew corollary. An interlinear tells you which Hebrew word stands behind an English word, and gives you a handle to study it. It does not tell you what the word means, how the sentence fits together, or whether the translation is right. And in Hebrew, before you say anything about a word, find out how many pieces it has.

This track ends with a full study of the Old Testament passage you chose and settled in Module 1, using every skill the modules teach, and each lesson in this module adds one piece of that study. You have already made a word-by-word sheet for its first verse. Today's piece is to lay out its second verse in a new way, by pieces. Head a clean notebook page with the reference of that verse.

Open the second verse in an interlinear on Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible. Rule five columns down the page, and start on the right-hand side of the page if you can, so that your notebook runs in the same direction as the Hebrew. In the first column copy each Hebrew word as printed, with its vowel points, slowly and letter by letter. In the second write its pieces, separating any prefix and suffix, as STEP shows them. In the third write the root or dictionary form and its Strong's number. In the fourth write the transliteration the tool gives. In the fifth write the English gloss. Leave space for the grammar, which lesson 3 will fill in.

Finally, set your column of glosses beside the BSB of the same verse. Mark with a small star every English word that has no Hebrew word of its own, such as is, of or that, and every Hebrew word that has no English word, such as אֵת (et). Beside each star write one line saying what you think is happening, using section 5 of this lesson. If you cannot explain a star yet, leave it marked. You will come back to it, and by the end of this module most stars will have an answer.