Jeremy Thompson Catholic PhD in Biblical Languages, Programmer, Runner

I was reading in Jeremiah 1 today, and I noticed a feature that I like in my Hebrew-English Tanakh. Word plays are often marked in notes.  For instance, there is a word play between shaqed “almond tree” and shoqed “watchful” (their translation) in Jeremiah 1.11 & 12 that is marked.  So, I looked ahead into Amos because there are a number of prominent word plays near the end of the book.  And, I found that the word plays are marked in a similar manner there.  I don’t know if JPS includes that in all of their editions or just the Hebrew-English ones.   I also looked at my NASB, ESV, and NIV print versions and found that they do this as well.  I think this is a very helpful feature.  It makes readers aware of word plays without having to force an artificial type of translation to communicate the literary feature in English.