Basics Of Biblical Hebrew Workbook Second Edition [Paperback]

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!".

I cannot recommend this workbook very highly, unless it improves considerably in subsequent revisions. (I have what I believe to be the first edition, copyright 2001, with the red cover.) It is useable, but only just barely so: it is painful to use, and it and does not do a very good job of practicing the student in a well-rounded fashion. It really ought to be supplemented (or replaced) with additional exercises from another source.

First, the exercises do not cover the material from the corresponding grammar in a well-rounded or consistent fashion. Some chapters receive short shrift, while others are loaded up with so many exercises that the student has no hope of completing them all. For instance, the exercise for chapter 11 is a scant two pages. Granted, this is an easy chapter, but rather than take this opportunity to review the preceding chapters, the authors present the student with two easy pages. In contrast, the exercises for chapter 14 span more than fifteen pages, including some quite difficult Hebrew composition, and the chapter 16 exercises comprise no fewer than thirty pages, so much that any competent editor would have red-penciled more than half of them.

Second, wholly insufficient care was taken when selecting the material for the exercises. Some of them cannot reasonably be expected to be completed in full even by model students. The worst case of this is the entirely-too-frequent occurance wherein a Hebrew composition exercise requires knowledge of a word the student will not learn for many more chapters. It is somewhat understandable when translation exercises going from Hebrew to English include words that the student has not had, since the lexicon in the back of the grammar is available, and it is desireable for the student to learn to use it. Even this happens far too frequently in this workbook, turning a few of the worse exercises into lexicon-page-flipping sessions so that the student is likely to lose track of the key point of the lesson in the face of looking up all those words, a bad case of "Let's You Save Me Some Work". If the authors had exercised a little more care, the exercises could be much better. Additionally, certain words (notably biconsonantal verbs) can be quite hard to find in the lexicon when their lexical form is an inflected form that the student will not study for many chapters yet and which as an extra consonant inserted into the middle of it that does not occur in the form in the exercise.

Still, this would be forgiveable in the Hebrew-to-English exercises, but when the same thing happens in exercises that require the student to compose Hebrew given the English, it is utterly inexcuseable. The lexicon does not go in that direction, and it is completely unreasonable to expect the student to conjure words out of thin air. This happens repeatedly in various exercises throughout the book, in some cases numerous times per exercise. (Sometimes there is an "answer key" in the form of a corresponding English-to-Hebrew section, but answer keys are supposed to be for _checking_ answers, not the only way to obtain the answer in the first place -- and sometimes there is no such key at all in any case.) This is just flagrantly careless beyond the bounds of all reason.

The exercises also sometimes require knowledge of grammatical constructs and word forms that have not been studied yet. For instance, the exercises by chapter 15 are already including verbals with inseparable prepositions, which are not covered in the grammar until chapter 20, without taking the trouble to tell the student what they are, mention which chapter in the grammar explains them, or even footnote their meaning.

Out of frustration, our teacher has actually instructed us to use an English translation, such as the NIV or NASB, to complete the Bible Translation exercises in the workbook, because there is no other way we could complete them. That should not be necessary; it was certainly was not necessary to do that in order to complete the Mounce workbook for the Greek, because Mounce was careful about selecting passages the student would actually be able to translate, and footnoting forms that had not yet been studied. These authors, in contrast, were not careful about those things.

This workbook is easily the worst feature of the BBHG textbook. I highly recommend that professors using that text develop their own exercises in preference to, or at least to supplement, the ones in this workbook.

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!

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