Basics of Biblical Hebrew: Workbook, 2nd Edition [Paperback]

Gary D. Pratico (Author), Miles V. Van Pelt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 17, 2007

The Basics of Biblical Hebrew Workbook has just gotten better. In order to keep students from becoming discouraged, especially in the beginning stages, the authors have decided to give more vocabulary aid, so students do not have to spend all their time trying to look up words in a dictionary. Many of the minor changes in this workbook have come as a result of professor and student feedback.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'The Biblical Language Series published by Zondervan is comprehensive and pedagogically cutting edge....If you have a passion to learn Biblical Hebrew and thus enrich your Old Testament studies, here is your starting point!' -- Alpha and Omega Ministries

(Alpha and Omega Ministries )

From the Back Cover

This workbook is designed for use with Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar, which presents a new, integrated method for teaching and learning Old Testament Hebrew. Field-tested in actual classroom settings, Basics of Biblical Hebrew combines the best of inductive and deductive approaches to make learning Hebrew a natural process and to show students from the very beginning how understanding Hebrew helps them understand the Old Testament.

- Most of the exercises consist of partial or complete verses taken directly from the Old Testament - Words the students may not yet be familiar with are footnoted - Unusual grammatical constructions are explained in footnotes - Field-tested at a number of colleges and seminaries - Complete answer key provided in the CD-ROM in the Basics of Biblical Hebrew textbook --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Zondervan; 2nd edition (July 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0310270227
• ISBN-13: 978-0310270225
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,055 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Total Immersion, November 3, 2006

By 

James S. Reitman (Colorado Springs) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Basics of Biblical Hebrew Workbook (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!".

30 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Carlessly Constructed -- First Edition Needs Work, December 22, 2004

By 

Nathan Eady (Galion, Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Basics of Biblical Hebrew Workbook (Paperback)

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars easy to use workbook, March 21, 2008

By 

Emma Root (MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Basics of Biblical Hebrew: Workbook, 2nd Edition (Paperback)

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!