The Vocabulary Guide to Biblical Hebrew

Unlike other Hebrew dictionaries such as BDB(Brown Driver Briggs or Koehler and Baumgartner, which are arranged according to word roots(BDB) or according to how the words appear in the Bible(Koehler), this one has several separate lists, each one arranged differently, such as by frequency, common root, identical looking words that have different meanings, by part of speech, and others. It also has an index of Hebrew Words in the back to help locate Hebrew words faster. Serves as a good go-between when trying to locate things in other Hebrew reference books. very practical!

Any student of biblical Hebrew knows that one of the most important tasks in mastering the language is mastery of vocabulary. This volume is a helpful guide in trying to do just that. The authors provide two ways of learning the vocabulary: by frequency and by similar roots. Both arrangements certainly make it easier to tackle the sheer number of words one must learn to master the Hebrew OT. While nothing can replace regular study and interaction with the Hebrew text, this volume is sure to be a dependable guide in that process. Much smaller than any standard Hebrew lexicon, it is much more accessible than, say, BDB and the aforementioned layout makes location of words very easy. I highly recommend this volume.

What a great resource. This great tool is a Hebrew Bible word list in various forms. It is the book that gives me fits because there's always a vocabulary quiz coming out of it every day for class.

This is a great book and a welcome addition for my library of Biblical Hebrew study aids. It will be beneficial to students (and teachers) of Biblical Hebrew at almost any level of proficiency.

The authors provide plenty of lists and ways to organize words to allow for multiple focused approaches to building up Biblical Hebrew vocabulary -- for example a frequency based word list for words appearing at least 10 times, a word list arranged by a common root, lists of nouns, lists of verbs (all verbs alphabetically and arranged by a verb type and stem...), statistical distributions of occurrences, etc..

Although I do wish it had even more list, such as a list of all hapax words for each section of the Tanakh for example, I do realize that it is beyond the scope of this book as intended by the authors. I highly recommend this book.

While most Biblical Hebrew textbooks take noble strides to acquaint students with basic vocabulary skills and memorization, a vocabulary guide like Van Pelt (or Landes) really equip the student with memorizing power. Don't waste your time memorizing words that only occur in BH a few times-this guide allows you to memorize the words of BH in descending word order frequency, thereby supplying the student with the skills early on to begin reading BH without too much help from lexicons and dictionaries. Also includes helpful statistics for the various verb forms that appear in BH.