Online texts

Al HaTorah – An independent scholarly project (unaffiliated with a university but produced by a collaborative group of scholars) creating born-digital editions of Bible commentaries.

Sefaria – This ever-growing online repository of Jewish texts is a powerful tool, and a good way to produce source sheets for your reference in class and in general. However, importantly, Sefaria texts must be used with caution (both Hebrew and translations). These are, with some notable exceptions, unchecked crowd-sourced texts. Tanakh, including the English which is an earlier JPS translation, is okay to use without comparison with a critically edited printed text.

Da’at – This large repository of texts and other resources is maintained by Herzog College (the college of education at Yeshivat Har Etzion). It provides standard editions of classic texts such as you might find on the shelf of a beit midrash. For Tanhuma, which is referenced frequently by Rashi in his commentary on Bamidbar, this is a fine edition of the standard text to consult; it is laid out in a way that is particularly easy to navigate. To find the passage you are looking for, select sefer > parasha > paragraph. The Da’at version has the ד”ה clearly separated from the text, breaks it down into subsections, and marks pesuqim in bright color. (There is another recension of Midrash Tanhuma, published by Solomon Buber in the late 19th cen. and generally referred to as “Tanhuma Buber,” that differs from the “standard” printed text mostly in Bereshit and Shemot, and there are still open questions about the version of Tanhuma that Rashi cites; but you should use the standard text for our purposes.)

Tools

Dicta – This scholar-led initiative (Israel Center for Text Analysis), newly available on the open web, offers intuitive search of Bible texts, as well as a  naqdan and a classifier of biblical texts. The search feature is a great adjunct to use with the Bar Ilan database, which has creaky search functionality. The naqdan can help you out if you are stuck on a bit of unvoweled text: input the phrase you’re unsure about (or copy and paste from a digital text) and you’ll have the vowels. (Note: niqqud is subject to context and thus can create ambiguous situations for a machine reader; do go over the generated niqqud and trust your instincts if something’s not right.)

Timeline of Biblical Commentators – From Al HaTorah (see section below about this site)

מקראות גדולות הכתר – The website of the Bar-Ilan Univeristy critical edition of Miqra’ot Gedolot, “ha-Keter” edition has plenty of resources, including supplementary articles to read and download, nicely formatted texts for copy&paste, and other readers’ tools (Hebrew only).

(See also: Maps)

Dictionaries

Two online dictionaries of rashei tevot (Hebrew abbreviations):

• ראשי תיבות – דעת – maintained by Herzog College
• kitzur.co.il – a serviceable online dictionary with a modern Hebrew focus

Print dictionaries:

• The BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon) is the standard student Hebrew-English dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (BH); it’s easy to find and relatively inexpensive, including in the Reference Section.
• Jastrow (Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi, and Midrashim), despite its billing, works well for studying medieval commentaries and you probably won’t need to go further for much of the Miqra’, either. Online version here, accessible though clunky (Heb-Eng).
• HALOT (Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament) is an updated and more scholarly Hebrew-English BH dictionary; it’s a multi-volume reference work for which there is also a concise versionavailable (ed. W. L. Holladay).
• A Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (Ozar Leshon ha-Miqra’), ed. Menachem Zvi Kaddari, is a Hebrew (BH) to Hebrew (MH) dictionary, recently republished by Bar-Ilan University Press. The old (incomplete) edition is in the REF section.

 Misc.

Image map of the Miqra’ot Gedolot daf – Hosted at the University of Calgary, this page has been up since the early days of the internet and is still a useful quick reference.

Ashkenazi Glossed Bibles at the British Library – An article, illustrated with examples, about medieval precursors to the multi-text format seen in Miqra’ot Gedolot, the Talmud, and many other texts beginning with the early printed Hebrew book.

Rabbi Ben Ezra – The Victorian poet Robert Browning’s poem inspired by the life of Ibn Ezra