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.