Biblical Research/Exegesis: Greek/Hebrew Fonts

Use these links to download the files you will need to configure Greek & Hebrew on your computer.

Use these links to download the files you will need to configure Greek & Hebrew on your computer.

Use tools like this with caution! Success is not guaranteed.

To use Greek and Hebrew in your documents, you can now choose between two different approaches:

1. Use special fonts that display English letters as though they were Greek and Hebrew, such as the common fonts produced by BibleWorks: bwgrkl for Greek and bwhebb for Hebrew.
2. Use Unicode to actually type Greek/Hebrew text alongside English. Many fonts support the full Unicode character set.

Whenever possible, use Unicode! Here's why:

• Unicode is the international standard for handling characters for all foreign languages, not just Greek and Hebrew.
• Unicode text will print more reliably.
• Unicode is the only way to post Greek/Hebrew to the web (see the examples of 2 Timothy 2:15 below).

  Unicode

  σπούδασον σεαυτὸν δόκιμον παραστῆσαι τῷ θεῷ, ἐργάτην ἀνεπαίσχυντον, ὀρθοτομοῦντα τὸν λόγον τῆς ἀληθείας.

  BibleWorks font

  spou,dason seauto.n do,kimon parasth/sai tw/| qew/|( evrga,thn avnepai,scunton( ovrqotomou/nta to.n lo,gon th/j avlhqei,ajÅ
  (This line will not look like Greek unless you have the BW font on your computer.)

Try copying and pasting each of these verses into a plain text editor like Windows Notepad, and you should see the difference between the actual Greek characters used by Unicode and the masked English characters used by the BibleWorks font.

This page aims to help you install, configure, and use the biblical languages using either approach.

BibleWorks supports Unicode for exporting Greek and Hebrew text into a word processor. You may/may not need to configure this in Bibleworks, depending on what version of BibleWorks you have.

• BibleWorks 8: Exports Unicode by default. You do not need to configure anything unless you want to change the fonts that BibleWorks uses to export.
   
• BibleWorks 7: You will need to configure Unicode in the BibleWorks settings. To do this, make your Options | Font menu look like the image below (click it to see a larger version).

You can set BibleWorks to export with any Unicode font: I use Gentium for Greek and Ezra SIL for Hebrew, the image below uses other fonts.

For more detailed information, see the post How Do I Use Unicode in BibleWorks? on the BibleWorks forums.

To configure Accordance to export Unicode, use these settings in the "Preferences" window (click the screenshot for a large version). This image is from Accordance 7.

If you don't see the buttons for changing the text direction for a paragraph (pictured above), then you may need to add Hebrew as a supported language in the Microsoft Office Language Settings tool.

Typically you can find the Microsoft Office Language Settings tool by browsing
Start > Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Language Settings

Make sure your window looks like this one below.

This work by Duncan Johnson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

You may reproduce any part of it as long as credit is included.  I encourage you to license your derivative works under Creative Commons as well to encourage sharing and reuse of educational materials.