Hebrew Quotations

I just noticed something very strange that may be a bug in the Gutenberg editor or in my “go-to” browser – Firefox, or in my feeble brain. While editing a new sermon post for next Wednesday, I saw that a multi-word Hebrew quotation taken from Blue Letter Bible was displayed backwards (incorrectly left-to-right) in the Gutenberg editor. I corrected the issue by editing the offending block as HTML, and adding explicit <rtl></rtl> tags surrounding the Hebrew text. Back in the visual editor I noticed another quotation of God’s covenant Name – יְהֹוָה Yehovah – was also displayed backwards. So I corrected that with explicit <rtl></rtl> tags too. I saved and previewed the post and all was rendered as I had hoped. But then I noticed that other quotations including the tetragrammaton – יְהֹוָה – were rendered correctly even without explicit <rtl></rtl> tags.

I have just reproduced the problem while writing this post. The quoted Hebrew text renders properly in the browser with or without explicit <rtl></rtl> markup, but the Gutenberg editor renders the Hebrew backwards without specific <rtl></rtl> tags. However, once any instance of Hebrew text in a given post is marked with <rtl></rtl> all the other instances render properly in the editor without needing <rtl></rtl> markup.

I’M SO CONFUSED!!!