Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary (Schwartz-Groves WHV)

Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary:

Schwartz-Groves Westminster Hebrew Vocabulary

© Daniel Schwartz. Version 2.0.3, May 2021.

Managed and maintained by staff of Westminster Theological Seminary.

This deck currently contains 686 Hebrew words, sorted by descending order of frequency, excluding proper names. This is all the Hebrew words that occur 47 or more times in the Hebrew Bible. The cutoff of 47+ frequency was chosen because, according to the calculations behind this list, it enables 90% recognition of the words in the Hebrew Bible.

English glosses in this list are separated into "primary glosses" and "additional glosses". Primary glosses are placed above any additional glosses, are presented in bold type, and are limited to three words or short phrases. The primary glosses attempt to give either the most common English translation(s) of a word or the closest English equivalent(s), while secondary glosses, when listed, attempt to fill out a better picture of the word's range of meaning.

Hebrew verbs are displayed without pointing, with the exception of middle weak (hollow) verbs, which are fully pointed in order to indicate their vowel type and to distinguish them from 2-waw and 2-yod verbs in which the middle radical is consonantal. Glosses for a verb usually correspond to its meaning in Qal, unless it was judged more helpful for the meaning of the verb to be memorized in another (more frequent) stem. Notes provide information on all stems which occur reasonably frequently, indicating number of occurrences, the pointing of the qatal third masculine singular form (where extant), and glosses for each stem. The first stem listed in the notes always matches the glosses for the card and the pronunciation in the audio recording.

All Hebrew words in this deck are set by default to appear in three card types, "Hebrew to English" (card:1), "English to Hebrew" (card:2), and "Audio" (card:3). Words are also tagged by frequency in sets of 10. If you want to study only with certain card types or within certain frequency ranges, you can either suspend cards, which will prevent them from appearing in any study sessions for as long as they are suspended (useful if you want to exclude certain card types), or use custom study sessions. Consult the Anki Manual and support pages for up-to-date instructions on suspending cards and using custom study sessions.

Permission is hereby granted to anyone to copy, store, modify, and distribute this vocab deck, as long as it is distributed free of charge and no other versions are shared on AnkiWeb. Where possible, please share the deck with others by directing them to the deck webpage on AnkiWeb, as updates may be made available there.

This deck was developed for use in Hebrew classes at Westminster Theological Seminary. Westminster students can use the "WTS_Heb_#" tags to further filter the deck or run custom study sessions based on the semester in which those Hebrew words are assigned. Westminster staff cannot provide any technical support for the deck to people who are not current Westminster students, although you are welcome to post any typos you find in the deck or any questions you have about it on AnkiWeb; other users may respond to your post or may benefit from what you have to say. For technical support, refer to the Anki Manual and support forums.

The English glosses and notes were produced by consulting a variety of resources, including BDB, HALOT, DCH, and earlier vocab lists prepared by Elizabeth Groves (compiled mainly from Weingreen, Holladay, and the Dillard and Van Pelt vocabulary cards). A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar, 2nd ed., by van der Merwe, Naudé, and Kroeze, proved especially helpful in producing notes on certain function words, and is occasionally cited within the cards as BHRG. Full references for all works consulted are provided on the Deck Information card (sorted as card 0).

The audio recordings in this deck were prepared by Elizabeth Groves, and are used by permission.

Frequency data were obtained from the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia Tagged (BHS-T) text as digitized by Accordance, morphologically tagged according to the Westminster Hebrew Morphology, v. 4.14. Slight manual adjustments were made to the frequency data to maintain consistency as the list was compiled. A word count total of 379,694 words was used to calculate percent vocab recognition, which includes filtering of Aramaic words, Hebrew proper names, Qere, and certain Masoretic marks that were inadvertently included in a wildcard word search in Accordance.

The images of Hebrew words are screenshots of the SBL Hebrew font, which is freely available at SBL's website. The "Notes" field contains running English and Hebrew text, which displays best with appropriate font support. If you separately download the SBL Hebrew font, the cards will first attempt to use that font for the notes; if Anki cannot detect or access that font on your device, the cards are styled to then use the Ezra SIL font, freely available at SIL's website. The Ezra SIL font has been embedded within this deck package, as their licenses (provided on the Deck Information card) kindly allow the font to be embedded within other software.