TDOT and Logos - a disappointment
I waited for years for Logos to publish the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. I owned a hard copy but still paid $400 to see it in Logos.
I prioritized it, but the first time I tried to use it, it didn't appear in my list of Hebrew lexicons. I looked up the word in my hard copy, and then I saw that the word in question did not appear in Hebrew script but English transliteration.
Let me just add that any publisher who uses transliteration instead of printing the Hebrew text, except when they print the English after the Hebrew lemma so an English reader knows how to pronounce the word, should be barred from publishing scholarly books at all. Maybe they can do children's books. Any body familiar with Hebrew hates the transliteration, and anybody who doesn't know Hebrew will find them useless, except as I said if they want to know how to pronounce the lemma.
Anyway, I guess Logos isn't linked by transliterated words. So I put the set in my passage guide, so if the passage is cited, I will have a link. Otherwise I will have to look up words in my hard copy and then look up the passage in Logos if I want to do any copying and pasting.
Ugh!
Comments
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The problem is that the print TDOT uses transliteration, and Logos faithfully reproduces that. I don't like it either, but it is what it is. What's the solution, Logos-wise? Tag transliterated Hebrew?
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."- G.K. Chesterton
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If I think of something, I will suggest it. I'm just venting.
Why do they do this? Who benefits from it? Is it cheaper to set up? Well, how did they do it in the old days when they typeset all those ancient languages in all the old commentaries and lexicons?. They sure were able to afford it then.
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Hi Larry.
Can you provide the example (reference and word, or translation in reference)?
Rick Brannan
Data Wrangler, Faithlife
My books in print0 -
Proverbs 16:1 I wanted to do a study of the word for plans. מַֽעַרְכֵי
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Larry Craig said:
Proverbs 16:1 I wanted to do a study of the word for plans. מַֽעַרְכֵי
Looks like you picked a word not covered in TDOT. Try the word for heart in the same verse לֵב
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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thank you
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Mark Smith said:Larry Craig said:
Proverbs 16:1 I wanted to do a study of the word for plans. מַֽעַרְכֵי
Looks like you picked a word not covered in TDOT. Try the word for heart in the same verse לֵב
logosres:tdot;hw=$D7$A2$D6$B8$D7$A8$D6$B7$D7$9A
george
gfsomselיְמֵי־שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְאִם בִּגְבוּרֹת שְׁמוֹנִים שָׁנָה וְרָהְבָּם עָמָל וָאָוֶן
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George Somsel said:Mark Smith said:Larry Craig said:
Proverbs 16:1 I wanted to do a study of the word for plans. מַֽעַרְכֵי
Looks like you picked a word not covered in TDOT. Try the word for heart in the same verse לֵב
logosres:tdot;hw=$D7$A2$D6$B8$D7$A8$D6$B7$D7$9A
The root (the word you point to) is covered but not the lemma. The lemma is found in HAL/BDB. So Logos Bible software can't locate it with a lemma search. What's the solution?
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Larry Craig said:
Let me just add that any publisher who uses transliteration instead of printing the Hebrew text, except when they print the English after the Hebrew lemma so an English reader knows how to pronounce the word, should be barred from publishing scholarly books at all.
These days manuscripts go relatively directly from the author's computer to the printing press, I believe, so Hebrew isn't that much of a problem. When books had to be typeset by hand it was. Typesetters rarely know Hebrew. So the publisher either had to find the rare (probably Jewish) typesetter that did. Or he had to use regular guys working very slowly, double and triple checking all their work (and probably still leaving a lot of errors behind). It gets expensive. Perhaps not that much back when labour was very cheap (and Jewish labour could be underpaid even more without consequences), but certainly in the last decades of manual typesetting, when workers were organized and wages much higher. And if it gets too expensive no one but libraries will buy, and there's not enough of them to pay the bills. So transliteration may be the only way to keep costs down and sales up, and thus the only way to publish the book at all.
Mac Pro (late 2013) OS 12.6.2
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I think the real answer is that Hebrew studies are not what they used to be in American schools, and publishers think they are doing people a favor. I will admit when my first book was published, the publisher was not familiar with Hebrew text, so I had to talk her through some of it on the phone. But these publishers that do scholarly books all the time, like Eerdmans, I think they are just making a big mistake.
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