Hebrew — The Hebraist

The Hebraist — Masoretic vowels, Qumran consonants, the Aramaic of the Targums.

The Hebrew-and-Aramaic language desk beside the cross-language biblical hat: OSHB, BHSA, DSS, SDBH and the lexicon shelf, the Sefaria Targums, the bridging crosswalk, and IIP’s inscriptions of Israel/Palestine.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these fourteen answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): hbo 30,739 · grc 6,312 · eng 5,912 · arc 5,777 · egy 3,050 · egy-Egyd 1,424 · ara 962 · cop 456 · heb 408 · lat 318 … and 11 more (nabu axis hebrew lists all).

Carried in by multilingual packs (ud — whole-source members whose other languages ride along, as of 7 November 2026): orv 9 · ota 5 · lzh 4 · frm 3 · fro 3 … and 14 more (nabu axis hebrew lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• The Hebrew-and-Aramaic language desk: OSHB (the Westminster Leningrad Codex), BHSA (ETCBC), the Dead Sea Scrolls consonantal text (dss), the Sefaria Targums (arc), and IIP’s inscriptions of Israel/Palestine.
• Dictionaries: sdbh (the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew) and the hebrew-lexicon shelf.
• Alignment works: ot and psalms — OSHB, BHSA and the Targum are the Masoretic witnesses; psalms carries the Masoretic→Greek renumbering.

Working the hebrew desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable hebrew               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync hebrew                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis hebrew          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis hebrew                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis hebrew   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu show urn:nabu:oshb:gen:1.1       # Genesis 1.1 in pointed Masoretic Hebrew
nabu show urn:nabu:oshb:ruth:1.8 --display reading  # qere resolved and cantillation stripped together
nabu align "GEN 1.1"                  # the Masoretic text beside the LXX and the versions
nabu show urn:nabu:oshb:gen:1.1 --display translit  # SBL-style LTR romanization for a bidi-less terminal
nabu define אור --lang hbo            # Brown-Driver-Briggs on the Hebrew lexicon shelf

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “Compare the two Masoretic editions of a verse.” → nabu_align "GEN 1.1" (work: ot) — OSHB (WLC) and BHSA (ETCBC) side by side with the Targum and Peshitta columns — two independent Masoretic witnesses at deliberately different annotation grains, never merged.

Terminal setup

• Hebrew and Aramaic (hbo/arc): cantillation stripped, points and maqaf kept, runs wrapped in RTL isolates. The terminal owns the bidi: the iTerm2 RTL toggle (Terminal.app has none); Ezra SIL or SBL Hebrew in a dedicated profile (+4pt), or Noto Sans Mono in the non-ASCII slot. --display translit (via Nabu::Hebr) is the legible fallback where bidi is unavailable.
• Note: hbo/arc are NFC-exempt, so --display full is byte-identical to the Masoretic source (mark order preserved).

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.