It’s Logos’ 25th Anniversary, and they’re offering a $25 coupon through March 1. That means it’s a great time to invest in some of the supplementary Old Testament resources I suggested (below), or N.T. Wright books, or Peter Enns, or John Walton, or Jodi Magness’ book on Daily Life in the Time of Jesus, or a line-by-line commentary on how the New Testament uses the Old Testament, or why modern translations differ in the New Testament, or Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s JPS Commentary on Ruth, or or or… There’s so much.
Here’s the Old Testament stuff I recommended.
- Concise HALOT or CHALOT, 31.99
- This is an abbreviated layman’s version of the current scholarly standard, the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament or HALOT. This will be an improvement over the abridged BDB. If you want to spend more money, some other lexicons provide essays on each word, the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (TWOT), Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament (TLOT, translated from German), and the New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (NIDOTTE), Evangelical like TWOT, but more scholarly and significantly more comprehensive. This is probably the most useful but also most expensive of these options. Or, there’s the full-on, 15-volume Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament for only $700.
- Jewish Study Bible, 24.99 (but the JPS translation is not included.) You’re getting the essays, notes, diagrams, maps, etc. You also have access to other Study Bibles, and Commentaries, from one-volume commentaries all the way up to the multi-volume Anchor Bible Commentaries, JPS Torah Commentaries, NIV Application Commentaries, etc. Buy individual volumes or all at once. Or, more realistically, watch for sales.
- The Jewish translation is sold separately for $10. Many other useful translations like the NRSV are also $10. Note that this version of the NRSV will not do what your free KJV does. That’s because the KJV is a reverse interlinear, tagged with the appropriate Greek and Hebrew. If you want that capability in the NRSV or ESV or some other translation, you have to acquire the reverse interlinear version (see my demo for explanation) which cost more individually or are sold as part of most packages.
- D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, $16.99. This is an introductory guide to common pitfalls people make when they start digging in to original languages and words.
Now, I know Logos looks intimidating, but you can treat it like a Kindle until you start figuring stuff out. Below, I walk you through another tool to help with words and translations.
As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.