Canonical form for Hebrew bibliography entries

[lyndondrake]

I'm using biblatex-sbl with LuaLaTeX and babel. I can create bibliography entries with Hebrew text if I put \texthebrew{} around the Hebrew components. This sort of works, but isn't ideal for author sorting:

I can either do e.g. \texthebrew{מרים אהרוני} in which case BibLaTeX/Biber/whatever thinks that this is just one name - the space in the middle has no effect on sorting or layout.

Or I can break it into components, in which case the in-text citation lays it out as מרים אהרוני ( means a space but I have to put something in Latin text to force the HTML to render in the wrong order - i.e. my PDF ends up with the author's first name, then a direction-breaking space, and then to the right of the first name the author's surname. Instead her name should show up as מרים אהרוני. The Bibliography section looks ok though and gets sorted on her surname.

What's the proper solution to this? It's not urgent so I can help fix things if need be.

[lyndondrake]

And as a little extra attempt:

\babelprovide[import=he,mapfont=direction]{hebrew}

almost produces the correct result. It means that I can just put the Hebrew name into the biblatex file and hence stuff like sorting works properly - biblatex knows the difference now between the first name and surname, uses the surname for sorting the bibliography, and correctly outputs a unicode sequence that results in first surname rendering properly.

What doesn't work is that babel's chunking of text groups adjacent text such as numbers and punctuation into the Hebrew block. I can imagine that with a nasty hack, such as biblatex-sbl adding a direction-breaking character at the start and end of each field might do the trick.

[dcpurton]

@lyndondrake , sorry delayed answer! (Probably due to COVID-19…).

I suggest you start with a question on tex.stackexchange.com for this, as it's a general issue.

But if you like, add a good simple MWE here along with desired output.

biblatex does have quite sophisticated language handling abilities. So it would also be useful to know if what you want can be done with the standard verbose style. And then see whether it works or not with biblatex-sbl.