Customer Reviews

The First Hebrew Primer: The Adult Beginner's Path to Biblical Hebrew, Third Edition

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Studying Hebrew can be a terrifying prospect for seminary students, and because many of the textbooks (such as Kelley, Weingreen, Mansour) are so inaccessible, lots of young pastors immediately forget most of what they learned. "The First Hebrew Primer" offers Hehrew without tears. Students who use this book (and it is used in many seminaries, but not enough) will learn easily and without pain. The book assumes students don't know the alphabet, then goes from there. Each day's work builds easily on the day before. If for each chapter one spends an hour with flashcards and two hours doing some of the exercises, one should have no trouble at all earning an A. The book has a whole year of Hebrew in a one semester textbook. The trick is leaving out a lot of the explanations for the many exceptions in Hebrew (often rare). The result is very fast progress. With every lesson the Hebrew Bible opens wider. In ten class periods my class was reading through Genesis, haltingly, but recognizing 50% to 75% of the words. By semester's end . . . reading just about anything with the help of a dictionary here and there. One could go through this by oneself, but it really is easier in a class. It's nice to have a teacher to answer questions and force one to prepare for a quiz. It's worth the tuition fee to have that help. But the nicest thing is that it's such an easy book to use that students don't feel their brains have frozen, leaving them unable to comprehend anything else. The person below who complained of gutterals not being called gutterals will be happy to hear that has changed, though if one isn't careful, one can learn about constructs, waw-consecutives, and various tenses without learning what they're called. A minor problem. It's true that one might like more examples from the Bible to translate, but when it comes down to it, we all have the Bibles anyway, so why not sinply turn to the source? Someone earning a Ph.D. in Hebrew would want something more detailed, perhaps, but when it comes down to it relatively few scholarly papers dealing with Hebrew actually require that level of expertise. Even the experts tend to turn to Hebrew grammars when they're working on that level.

I'm currently teaching Intro Hebrew and have looked at a number of books on this topic. This Primer is the best text for this purpose that I've found by a long shot. Lessons are well arranged and, though simple, are not simplistic. Students have the opportunity to progress at a very high rate. The selection of vocabulary is wonderful with every word being a high-frequency word in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The downfalls of this text are: 1) use of non-standard terms for grammatical features of the language - this is both a positive and a negative: positive in that it keeps the intimidation factor down for new students; negative in that for those students who go on from this book (and I suggest many will want to do so) need to learn the standard terms used by nearly every other grammar and text. 2) that's it; no other real downfalls.

For what this text purports to be (A First Hebrew Primer) it succeeds magnificently! This book will not leave the student proficient, but that's not its purpose. My wife learned Hebrew by using Seow's Grammar for Biblical Hebrew - a great intro grammar, but horrible as an intro text. She can tell you about the minutiae of Hebrew, but has no love for it. I learned using the Primer and have seen many others who have learned by using it. The common factor is that a high-percentage of us now LOVE Hebrew, and couldn't wait to learn more about the finer points found in Seow.

This was the first book I chose to learn Hebrew from. I later got another book to supplement my learning, and ended up abandoning this one and going to the other one entirely.

The lessons consist of vocabulary, an explanation of the topic of the lesson in clear language, and exercises which consist of translation of random sentences, of various "tall tales" such as The Gingerbread Boy which have been rendered in Hebrew, and of a simplified version of the Book of Ruth. The print is large and clear.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems. First of all, the book uses nonstandard terminology for various grammatical features. This is completely unnecessary - after all, the book has to explain what the word means either way - why not go ahead and use the terms that the rest of the Hebrew grammars use? Next, the book gives incomplete explanations or ignores entirely many features of Hebrew, some of which are absolutely necessary for reading even the simplest Biblical text.

As an example, take the explanation of the Dagesh in Chapter 3. From it, we find that the Dagesh changes the pronuncation of the Beged Kefet letters, and is usually found in those letters when they begin a word and not found in them when they end a word, and also that the letters aleph, hey, chet, ayin, and resh never take a dagesh. And that's it! That's all you learn about the Dagesh. No mention of the core fact of the Dagesh Forte - that it represents a doubling of the letter. It would have helped me immensely to understand that the Dagesh Lene represents the fact that the Masoretes pronounced bgdkft as stops when they followed a consonant, and as fricatives when they followed a vowel. With the explanation in this book, you don't even have enough information to determine whether a Dagesh in a bgd kft letter is a Dagesh Lene or Dagesh Forte. You cannot pronounce words correctly.

And it goes on like this - important things that you need to know to read the Bible are left out. I do not believe a student who completed this book would be ready to read the Bible.

I switched to Seow's A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew. It explains many details. Like a reviewer on the Amazon page for that book noted, I had many "Aha!" moments when reading it. And here's a tip: You don't have to memorize every detail of every grammatical feature at first. Just get the idea and move on, and flip back to earlier parts of the book when you need to. But the good thing is: the explanations are there for when you need them, whereas in this Primer they are nowhere to be found. (On the downside, you must go ahead and buy a Hebrew Bible and lexicon when you get Seow, because he has you working directly with those tools. But, really, that's not a downside after all, because you would need to buy them eventually anyway, and this way you get direct practice doing what you eventually must do: read REAL Hebrew text and use a lexicon.)

I shopped around for a number of texts to pursue self-study of hebrew with the goal of being able to read (with dictionary assistance) biblical texts and understand prayerbook liturgy. This text - with the answer book which is a separate purchase - is what worked for me.
The approach is to cover the grammer at a high level to allow an over-all translation competence at the end of the book, while blurring some of the fine points (especially the patterns of vowel changes). This has worked well for me. It is necessary to do all of the exercises to make this work, altho I have skipped the english-to-hebrew exercises, since I'm only interested in translation. I also found it necessary to buy the accompanying set of flashcards to drill myself on the vocabulary constantly. I've taken about a year to go through this in my (little) spare time, but I'm almost done and I'm impressed by how much I am able to read.
When done, I'll go on to studying individual texts with dictionary and more advanced grammers for reference as issues arise.
If you are self motivated to learn to read biblical hebrew and are willing to spend a bit more for accessories (answer book and flash cards) this is the best self-education system I found - and I bought at least 3 other "introductory" grammers.

On the plus side:

(1) This book can be used for self-study. At the outset you will probably welcome someone to delineate the Hebrew characters and pronounce the sounds for you, but after that you will manage to work through the text even by yourself.

(2) No grammar for grammar's sake. This book is aimed at teaching the minimum you need before tackling your first OT chapters.

(3) Well chosen and highly recurrent vocabulary. After that much repetition you will memorize most of the words effortlessly.

(4) Lots of exercises. Generally speaking, exercises are better dull than difficult--and these aren't even dull all the time.

(5) Crisp fonts, clear layout. Given the unfamiliar Hebrew alphabet, this is quite important, and yet many primers (especially older ones) fail to meet the condition.

On the minus side:

(1) Grammar fragmented and oversimplified. You don't really get what you need in order to grasp even the simplest OT passages. Terminologically and even notionally, this book leaves you where it found you, unable to understand what any relevant grammar has to tell you about the language.

(2) Ivrit under a Biblical disguise. Much of this text is best described as Modern Hebrew without modern words, some of the basic features of Biblical Hebrew having been pushed aside as mere details of style. The overall picture you get is false. (I am not one of those who believe Biblical Hebrew should be taught exclusively on bits and pieces taken from the OT. Still, what is needed is a reasonably good pastiche, not the image of two Tel Avivis engaging in a weird conversation about the king's cattle, the three little pigs and the altars of Yhwh.)

Advice:

The pluses of this text outweigh its minuses. Unless you like stiff textbook prose and a steep learning curve, you will probably find it useful. You may buy it together with another excellent book, Lambdin's "Introduction to Biblical Hebrew", which is rather more serious: work through the first ten chapters of the Primer, then start using Lambdin as a second-wave text.

This book is a stand alone product- it teaches one how to read the letters and then proceeds to explain the grammar. However, if one needs to learn more slowly I recommend the following sequence. #1 Teach Yourself to Read Hebrew #2 Prayerbook Hebrew the Easy Way and then read this book. There will be some redundancy and it is time consuming but your brain will handle it all better. If you already can read Hebrew letters, then you can skip step #1. This is a well constructed book with passages from the book of Ruth as well as old children's fairy tales translated into hebrew for your learning pleasure. The book is self contained and one never has to use a dictionary to understand the hebrew in the book. Buy this book and you'll be ready to tackle the Bible yourself. (with a dictionary)

If you must learn Biblical Hebrew in your college, grad school or seminary, and you are a complete beginner, and the "intro" course there does not use this book (investigate!), heed my warning: WORK COMPLETELY THROUGH THIS BOOK BEFORE YOU TAKE THAT COURSE! You can do it in a quarter or semester if you're disciplined enough, especially (as another reviewer says below) in a study group.

Your sanity will thank you as you help the classmates who are writhing in agony around you.

I have yet to find another "Hebrew Primer" for adults that effectively helps the complete beginner.

This book is not college-level, and it won't enable you to "test out" of Hebrew Intro, but it wasn't designed for that. College (or higher) level introductory Biblical Hebrew will be manageable AFTER you finish this book.

It is a pretty good beginners book, but the later chapters tend to leave you high and dry. There are many Hebrew verbs that still can not be identified after thoroughly studying this book and it's appendixes.

I do have to say, that it does a very good job introducting the basics of Hebrew, and extensively studies the Qal verb pattern. Unfortunately, Hiphil, Hitpael and Niphal patterns are given very little excercise, and Polel and Histafel are only covered in the appendix extremely briefly.

Also, this is a fine book if you do not plan on learning any other languages. However, most seminary students also need to learn Greek, a far more complex language, gramatically speaking. This book uses it's own gramatical terms, rather than scholastic terms. Going to a more advanced book, which you will need to in order to learn more advanced Hebrew, will leave you lost in terminology. It wouldn't have been difficult to use the correct terminology in the first plaace.

If you are using this to learn Hebrew for your own enjoyment, or personal use, this is a fine book. It won't quite get you ready for reading Biblical Hebrew though.

This book was such a blessing to me. I am not in a place where I can get formal Hebrew instruction, and this book is so easy to learn from. I have not seen another Hebrew book like it, that teaches the grammar and vocabulary in such an easy to follow manner. I highly recommend it for anyone wanting to study Hebrew.

I am very enthusiastic about this book. Until now, I have bought many Hebrew Grammars as the Weingreen, Pratico, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar and others in the Greek language. None is so teachable as this one for Biblical Hebrew. The beginning is very soft and easy. There are not many grammar details or exceptions of the general rules, only the main rules. But the teaching is not simplistic; there are also endnotes, where you can read more details or exceptions.

The pronunciation is the same as in modern Hebrew. So you learn to spell ancient Hebrew as modern Israelis speak now. This is easier and useful. Other Grammars teach another way of pronunciation that could be more accurate regarding the ancient pronunciation, but Israelis don't speak now like that. So in the future, if you want, you could learn much easier the modern Hebrew.

This is not a complete Hebrew Grammar. If you want to learn more, you can buy for example the Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar by Pratico and Van Pelt.

It contains many exercises which make you learn the language by repetition of the words and the rules. This book doesn't contain detailed terminology. The kind of teaching is modern and pleasant.

If you are a beginner and you want to learn Biblical Hebrew, don't hesitate to buy this book. You will not waste your money. I advise you to buy also the "Primer Answer Book" of the exercises, and the "Audio Companion tape or CD set". So you could learn better the pronunciation by Hebrew teachers.

There is also an excellent digital edition for self study, which contains the Textbook, the Answer book and the Audio Companion together. You can buy the Audio CD set and the Digital Edition only by the EKS Publishing Co. (www.ekspublishing.com). The rest you can buy also by the Amazon.com.

May you enjoy teaching and learning of Biblical Hebrew by this book!

Spyros Karalis