Book Description

Several Hebraists of the last decade have called for the inclusion of discourse-level issues in introductory studies of Biblical Hebrew. In Learning Biblical Hebrew, Bryan Rocine has written a first-year teaching grammar for Biblical Hebrew prose, taking the student from basic pronunciation forward.

Students who have completed introductory courses in Biblical Hebrew often voice well-founded frustrations. They know some of the parts of the language, but they cannot read biblical text with any nuanced understanding. Rocine seeks to gain, for first-year students, the greatest possible advantage for their one-year's efforts.

The course is comprised of fifty lessons and eight readings, which run concurrently with lessons 15-50. Each lesson is based on an actual biblical "verse" that illustrates the topic(s) for the lesson. The goals for each lesson are stated at the outset. Almost every lesson contains review material from the previous lesson before introducing the new material. Also for review, the student is given cross-referencing to previously learned material throughout the book. Every lesson has assignments of two types: (1) speed drills in which the student practices the lesson's materials as illustrated in examples containing minimal differences and (2) translation exercises taken from actual biblical texts.

The book also contains charts for all the major paradigms and a list of those charts at the front of the book. This volume teaches a vocabulary of approximately 400 words, and the student reads about 1,000 verses of actual biblical texts.