Basics of Biblical Hebrew: Workbook, 2nd Edition

This book is a great addition to the textbook. It reinforces the Hebrew learned in the textbook, through translating and practicing the specifics of each lesson.

I use this as an adjuvant to my classes, just to get extra practice. Even though it is oriented to Christian students, the Hebrew is sound for my Jewish studies. One good point: the 'font' size of the Hebrew is large enough that you don't need a magnifying glass to read the vowel points! And the answer key is internet based, which is convenient for juggling page and answer key!

This workbook is better than the Basics of Biblical Hebrew grammar book. This workbook has many different phrases, sentences, and scripture passages for you to read from, and helps to build a strong foundation in terms of applied Hebrew grammar, and inductive exposure to the language.

There are many inflected verbal forms in this workbook that are not broken down into their stem, tense, person, number, or gender, and all you are given is their inflected definition at the bottom of the page. Treat these words as if they were vocbulary words, and memorize them in their current form.

For example, the Hebrew word "vay-yomer" means "And he said". This is a Hebrew word in the imperfect state with what is called the "vav/waw conversive". However, the workbook does not tell you this information. It only tells you that "vay-yomer" means "and he said". Treat this word as if it were a vocabulary word, and memorize both it's current form and definition. By doing this, you're actually simulating natural learning process. You will be picking up on prefixes, suffixes, and inflected verbal stem forms without actually being formally introduced to them, so that when the time comes to introduce them in your Hebrew grammar study, you will already be familiar with them in an intuitive sense.

If what I said sounds like a bunch of jibberish, I'll put it another way. Suppose a someone said, "Tim went to the store, him will be back later", and you overheard it. Naturally, you know from natural exposure to the English langauge that this is improper grammar. The word "him" is the objective form of "he", while "he" is the subjective form which should be used in place of "him" in the example sentence given. However, we native English speakers don't "think" about making such a transition in our minds. We speak the language based on how we've learned it through natural exposure, and thus we know intuitively to say "he", and not "him" in such instances. The same methodology is applied in this workbook for certain words, especially verbal forms. This is truly important when learning Hebrew because the verbal system in Hebrew can be VERY cumbersome at first glance.

I have this workbook for my Hebrew class at seminary, and it offers many good exercises for hours of translation and parsing enjoyment.

I have not reviewed other first year Biblical Hebrew workbooks but I can compare this experience with my previous study of four other languages. This workbook is closely coordinated with the textbook by Pratico and Van Pelt and meant to be used in the same sequence as the material covered in the textbook. I found the exercises to be very carefully designed so as not to discourage the beginning Hebrew student; this is a common besetting problem because the morphology, grammar, and syntax differs so much more from English than Biblical Greek or other Indo-European languages. From the first exercise on, the author has been very careful to cull examples for parsing of nouns, pronominal suffixes, prepositions/prefixes, construct forms, and (especially) the verbal system that build gradually enough for most students to stay afloat, given a pace of learning that aims to complete the textbook in a 2-semester time frame. Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the design is inclusion of real snippets for translation of the biblical text from the earliest exercises on. I found myself actually anticipating the "real" stuff from the Bible at the end of each chapter's series of exercises and blown away at how quickly I could recognize various forms, starting with the noun system, prepositions, and constructs. When the translations include forms that have not been covered in the text, generous footnotes provide hints that explain those forms, so as to allow for smoother recognition of forms that have been covered while at the same time seeing syntactical relationships in context, even before the other forms are covered. Although my instructor assigned only a fraction of the examples of Bible translation from each chapter, I was "hooked" and invariably ended up doing the whole translation exercise each time, saying to myself "I can do this!".