Something which is frequently discussed by all sorts of readers of the Bible is what happens when a person's name is changed. Abram becomes Abraham, for example, and that brings with it a change in the name's meaning but also a change in the name's numerology. What happens, though, when a name is spelt differently, changing the numerology more than anything else?

For example, David is spelt two different ways in the Bible. In the books of Samuel, his name appears as daleth-vau-daleth. However, in Chronicles, he is called daleth-vau-yod-daleth. This does help with pronounciation -- adding the long e sound means he will not be confused with daleth-vau-daleth pronounced "dohd," which means "uncle" -- but it also adds the value of the yod, which is ten. I haven't looked at this closely yet to see if there's a major difference, but in Chronicles David is a much better person than he is in Samuel. The whole incident with Bathsheba -- committing adultery and having the husband killed to cover it up -- is gone by Chronicles. I need to look at the values to see if there's a significance, but does anyone have any ideas?

Regarding dictionaries and reference tools, I think the best Hebrew to English (but not English to Hebrew) dictionary out there is Brown, Driver, and Briggs' A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. It's sometimes harder to use than the Bantam Meggido, since you have to look up words by their root, but after each word, it has a definition followed by every use of the word in the Hebrew Bible. Quite helpful when, say, you want to know how the word "to remember" is used in the Bible, or want to know every particular use of a Name of God. It's also less than $25, so it's inexpensive and worth having in your intellectual arsenal.

I've also found very helpful The NIV Interlinear Hebrew-English Old Testament. It's much better than even facing-page translations when your Hebrew is as bad as mine.