The 21st Century is truly amazing. Take Google Translator for instance. This happened to me this past week. On a newspaper forum, vBulletin format which I love, someone suggested that the Saudis have an official English translation of the Quran. I have wanted for this past year an Arabic-Hebrew Interlinear Quran. Two similar sounding roots in different script. I equate Hebrew with block printing and Arabic with Gregg Shorthand. But there are many roots which are similar and should be easy to translate from one to another. That way I have a more global "feel" for how ancient Middle Easterners expressed themselves with an economy of hard copy. Hard copy was extremely fragile and expensive. It still is in the original. Only stone walls endured. Unfortunately for all of us, the Library of Alexandria was destroyed.
Well I do have the cdrom The Trope Trainer which is actually the 304K characters digitized. So, in effect, I've got the whole Temple of Jerusalem in my laptop. I wish I had the same thing with the Quran. I could then copy/paste verses and run it through the Google translate into Hebrew. The official Saudi English site provides the English that I can run through the Google Translate into Hebrew. It was amazing. I used Sura:9:3 which was included in the thread that we took part in. It really did help me use my Siddur Hebrew which I learned 7-12YO. In case you don't know, my kids (in their fifties now) and I never were allowed to use Hebrew with the Torah or TaNaK. Especially we females. The Trope Trainer set me free together with Jeff Benner. I'm 80YO and glad to be alive to enjoy all this freedom of the press. I could be wrong. However it seems to me that the Internet is keeping us from being able to copy/paste Arabic text directly from the Qurans on line so people who are interested in both the Quran and the Bible can compare them in Hebrew. I'm interested from a historical POV. I am an Atheist. I recognize that finally. This has proved it to me, the fact that I don't understand why I can't copy the Arabic text that exists on the official site while I can copy the English text. Sort of looks like a conspiracy to me. I think an English Quran is exactly the same as an Arabic Quran and therefore all Hebrew enabled Northern Hemisphere folks under freedom of the press should be able to copy/paste text from the Quran, just like we do from the Israeli Hebrew Bible and run the Arabic text through any Arabic Hebrew translator. Then I could have fun comparing the results in English, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish. What happened to me when I ran the English to Hebrew, is that I was pleasantly surprised with how it awakened my Hebrew that was buried deep inside my brain. I think of all the public school kids who are being denied this "judge for yourself" education about the Middle East via two important Semitic languages.
