Helping Everyone Grow in Reading the Hebrew Bible - from any language

The Vision for a Multilingual Hebrew Reader’s Bible

I want to show you how amazing this BART Bible app is for the study of Hebrew and cast a vision also for the idea of getting this into all the major languages of the world one day so that everyone who doesn't speak English can also enjoy its functionality that I'm about to show you.

So let's jump into this. You can see that I have two windows. I can scroll here. Genesis 1. I can scroll here and you can see how they move together. Really nice to have these in parallel. Now if I click on the window below, if I tap that, I can see up top that this is the WEB version of the Bible in the top left.

Now if I click that, I can see that I have these different translations downloaded into the app. If I want to download new translations, I can just click that and you can see in white what I have already downloaded and in green what I haven't downloaded.

So I could easily download in Korean, have it in parallel in some of these other languages, and we would love to fill this with all the major languages of the world. And maybe you could help us with that.

If you know how or you know a version that's open source, everything about this app is open access, open source. So let's see a little bit more of the functionality we have here. On the bottom window, if I want to scroll or swipe between different versions, I can do that by swiping.

And I can see now I have the ASV, I swipe again, I can have the Hebrew, I swipe again, I have the NET. Now if I don't want to have the English, I can just tap with two fingers on the Hebrew window. Boom, and instantly I have full screen Hebrew.

If I tap again with two fingers, I can have that back with the English. Really amazing. If I tap again and I want to have full screen experience and I want to swipe over to see the English, I can do that.

I can just swipe to the right, and there we go. Swipe back, and there's the Hebrew. Now what if I want to hear how this Hebrew sounds? I can do that. I can hit play. Now what if that's too fast for me?

I'm a beginner, I want to slow down the speed. In the bottom right, I can move that a little slider, and now it'll be slower. Brilliant. Now where does this audio come from? Well, to keep the app light, this audio can be downloaded depending on what you need.

So let's say you don't want all of the Bible, you just want to study Genesis with the audio. Well, you can do that. I've downloaded just this first chapter. Now if I go to chapter two, so I'll hit up here on the top, Genesis 1 -1, and I can go to Genesis 2 -1.

Now there's another easier way to do that. If I tap with three fingers, I immediately have a menu at the top appear, and I usually have that hidden, but you can have it there all the time. So three-finger tap, and that appears, and then you can see that in the middle, I can move between chapters.

So chapter three, chapter four, chapter five. Now on the left, those are buttons to move between books of the Bible, so I can jump down to Exodus, jump back to Genesis, jump to Exodus. Okay, so we're in Genesis chapter two.

If I hit play, it will tell me, well, we don't have that audio on your phone yet. Would you like to download just this chapter, or would you like to download the whole book of Genesis audio, which is the button in the middle?

And so I can say yes, I just want this chapter. Now let's look at some other amazing functionality that this app has. I'm going to hide the menu at top, three-finger tap, and let's say that I want a reader's Hebrew Bible experience.

Reader’s Hebrew Bible Features and Lexicon Tools

So there's a lot of vocabulary I don't know yet. I'm a beginner, and so if I need to tap on a word that I don't know, like maybe this one, I can do that, and it says his work. Once again, I tap it, says his work, it will give me the root in this little window that pops up.

It will also give me the parsing analysis. It's brilliant because it appears, it gives you the information you need quickly, and then gets out of your way so that you can keep building fluency by reading large chunks of text.

It's also better than an interlinear because it doesn't distract you with the way the words are spaced out differently. So let me show you. You can also have an interlinear. If you tap the little binoculars, which is the symbol for the view menu up at the top on the right, you can see that I can click interlinear, and boom, I have an interlinear, and that's fine for some people, especially people who are barely beginning.

They want quick access to something, and they don't want to be tapping the word, but they can still tap the word and see the parsing analysis. If I want to see that parsing analysis very quickly and have it all available right on the screen without having to click anything, I can also do that.

And there it is. So I'm going to take that off and take off the interlinear and the parsing, and now we're back to where we were. Once again, I can tap Acher, and it will say, give me the gloss, give me the root, all that kind of thing.

So imagine having this in your language. Now, some other powerful features I want to show you are the ability to do amazing searches and also looking up words in lexicons. So for instance, say we're here in Exodus, and I've tapped Shemot, and it gives me that, but I want to go deeper into this in a lexicon.

So what I can do is I can long press Shemot, and it gives me all of these options, and I have the BDB entry for Shemot right here, and it gives me Shem, and I can scroll through here, and I can jump to the references that it has, and look at the entire entry in BDB, which is amazing.

And I can go back. I can also look it up in Strongs, as you saw. There's that Strongs option there, and then I have the ability to highlight it. I can copy it, I can share it, and I can search for the form or for the root Shem.

So if I want to search for all the occurrences of Shem in the whole Hebrew Bible, I can do that very quickly. And here I get a list on my searches, and it's a long one, and it doesn't just give me Shem, but anything with Shem as the root.

So there's Shimcha, etc. And then if I want to go to that verse, I just click that verse, and it'll take me there in context, and highlight in green the word that I had searched for. Now that leads me to the question, what does it take to make this possible in your language, in another language besides English, so that you can enjoy the same reading experience, and be able to just tap a word, and have this come up, have a gloss to help you to be training wheels as you encounter more of the Hebrew Bible.

How the Web Interface Supports Language Volunteers

Well, let me show you how this can be done. So this is where we enter the information that we need to have that reading experience of the language. So this is the interface, let me show you around. What we'll be doing is going to hebrewgreekbible .online.

So just that, I've already got it loaded up here, to Job 1 .1. And you can see here, there's this menu I can toggle on and off with more information, and I have a display line here. And this will show me different things, just like in the BART Bible app, it will show me options for displaying the parsing, or the pronunciation, or other things like that.

We're not going to worry about that right now. What we need is a logon. So let's imagine that you want to volunteer to help put this in your language, okay? You would talk to us, we would get you your own personal login, and then you'd be able to work from anywhere in the world on this, and it would be saved in the cloud and all of that.

So you would log in, so I'm going to log into mine. And then right here, we can see what gloss we want to work on. So far, we've added these glosses for people to work on, but if you have another language that you want to work in, we can add it.

We can also add a specialized font right here, if you need a specialized font for your language. Okay, so here we have now the English gloss, the Hebrew, and then places fields to enter these translations into Spanish in this case.

Also, you can do the same thing as in the BART app, you can play this verse, you can change the speed, you can change the zoom of the text, if you want it bigger or smaller. You can change even the, if you want it in dark mode or not, you can change all kinds of stuff.

And if you go to the help menu, there's a lot more information that will help you figure out what to do with shortcut keys and also help you remember the color scheme of the glosses that you're working on.

Gloss Colors, Approval, and Exporting Finished Work

So right here, we see that black glosses, so right here, we don't have any ones that are black, but if I hit, if I make this correction, I say, un nombre. Okay, it's blue, but if I hit enter now, that becomes black.

Okay, that means I've approved it, and that gloss is ready to export and bless the world out there and be imported into the BART Bible app, etc. Okay, so that tells it that it's been checked, approved, corrected, or whatever, and it's ready to go.

So that's black. Blue is an approved gloss for this word in another verse, but not here. So it looks for things that you've done in the past when you've been glossing, and it says, okay, well, haya was glossed previously as fue, and in another verse that you already worked on, so we're fairly sure that this is a valid gloss for this word, and it could be, but it could be estaba or era or había, depending on the context.

Now, to get that menu, I just hit the down arrow, and here I see in blue the different ways that I have translated this in the past as well, and glosses, depending on the context again, and so I can select había if I want to, and then I can hit enter and keep going, and it moves on automatically to the next one.

Now, what is the red? Let's look here at the help menu. The red is guessed by Google Translate. Okay. So it's guessing that from the translation by Google of the English gloss that we already have, and so this is actually fine.

I would actually put the de, the of part there, and then just put ooze here, and keep going. Okay. Obviously, this is wrong because it's a, it's not, it's not work, like job. It's Job. It's a name, and so we keep going through that, and so now we can, we can see how this would, this, what this would look like for someone to work on this, and you would get better and better at it.

You can also tab through. Use the tab and all this. I'll link to a video by the creator of this interface that gives you even more detail on how to do this. So yeah, if I, if I hit tab or enter, it will approve these, these glosses.

All right. So if all of them are good, if they're all blue or red and they're all good, I look at all of them. I can hit approve all to do that faster if I want, and so, so this is basically the idea.

If we wanted to get this into other languages, then once this is done for a book or several books, we could, like if you're, if you're done with the Book of Job, you could then hit action, export glosses, and that would export them so that they could then be imported into the Bible app, and you could have that reading experience in your own language, which would be amazing.

Search, Lexicons, and the Goal of Global Access

Now, another couple things, and just, just to show you how powerful this interface is, you can also right-click words, and you can display, for instance, the BDB entry, or you could display a lexicon in Chavis in Spanish, and that, that we want to have this available in multiple languages eventually, so that you could look something up in a lexicon in many languages once we get those lexicons available.

That's another project, but I could look up BDB and get a full lexical entry of, of this name. Let's do something more interesting, like Elohim BDB entry, and I can see here, as I scroll down, all the different kinds of uses, and if I click on one of these verses, then I can jump to that verse if I want to see it.

All right, so I hope that gives you an idea of what we're up against and how this can all be done if we want to make this available in many different languages. So, this is all free, it's going to be freely available once it's done, so if you want to be a part of this, we need an army of volunteers who will, we can give logons, they can work on this whenever they have time, and slowly chip away at it so that eventually, in five to ten years, we can have, you know, the major gateway languages of the world, major 45 or 50 languages, all have access to the same kind of learning experience of reading Hebrew.

Okay, so this is amazing. There's way more in this app that you can discover by experimenting. There's a tutorial, if you go to this menu and you click on tutorial, you can also learn a lot more. It will walk you through all the different kinds of things.

It's really powerful. I haven't even scratched the surface of its capabilities. So, enjoy and consider contributing to making this app available in more languages.