Customer Reviews

The Vocabulary Guide to Biblical Hebrew

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While most Biblical Hebrew textbooks take noble strides to acquaint students with basic vocabulary skills and memorization, a vocabulary guide like Van Pelt (or Landes) really equip the student with memorizing power. Don't waste your time memorizing words that only occur in BH a few times-this guide allows you to memorize the words of BH in descending word order frequency, thereby supplying the student with the skills early on to begin reading BH without too much help from lexicons and dictionaries. Also includes helpful statistics for the various verb forms that appear in BH.

This is a great book and a welcome addition for my library of Biblical Hebrew study aids. It will be beneficial to students (and teachers) of Biblical Hebrew at almost any level of proficiency. It's great for research and reference purposes as well as vocabulary building. As far as building my vocabulary, I think it also helps and is certainly useful, but I personally learn the best through reading. I can read a word in a passage once and remember it because of the context, while I will struggle to remember a word even after running numerous times through my word list. But obviously everyone learns differently and for me reading happens to be the best way to pick up new words and make them stick.

As for the book, the authors provide plenty of lists and ways to organize words to allow for multiple focused approaches to building up Biblical Hebrew vocabulary -- for example a frequency based word list for words appearing at least 10 times, a word list arranged by a common root, lists of nouns, lists of verbs (all verbs alphabetically and arranged by a verb type and stem...), statistical distributions of occurrences, etc.... Although I do wish it had even more list, such as a list of all hapax words for each section of the Tanakh for example, I do realize that it is beyond the scope of this book as intended by the authors. I highly recommend this book.

Any student of biblical Hebrew knows that one of the most important tasks in mastering the language is mastery of vocabulary. This volume is a helpful guide in trying to do just that. The authors provide two ways of learning the vocabulary: by frequency and by similar roots. Both arrangements certainly make it easier to tackle the sheer number of words one must learn to master the Hebrew OT. While nothing can replace regular study and interaction with the Hebrew text, this volume is sure to be a dependable guide in that process. Much smaller than any standard Hebrew lexicon, it is much more accessible than, say, BDB and the aforementioned layout makes location of words very easy. I highly recommend this volume.

Unlike other Hebrew dictionaries such as BDB(Brown Driver Briggs or Koehler and Baumgartner, which are arranged according to word roots(BDB) or according to how the words appear in the Bible(Koehler), this one has several separate lists, each one arranged differently, such as by frequency, common root, identical looking words that have different meanings, by part of speech, and others. It also has an index of Hebrew Words in the back to help locate Hebrew words faster. Serves as a good go-between when trying to locate things in other Hebrew reference books. very practical!

I found this book to be exactly what I wanted. Studying Hebrew, I can know all the consonants, vowel marks, cantillation marks, structure, and so on. But if I don't know the vocabulary, I still can't read scripture. This book gives me the most frequently used vocabulary, so I can study, drill, practice those, and be that much quicker to being able to read on my own. Without knowing the vocabulary, Hebrew is just a lot of pretty squiggles. With the index in back, it also doubles as a quick lexicon. I recommend it for anyone beginning their study of Hebrew.

This is an amazing tool, easy to use and very concise. This is a great tool for Biblical Hebrew student. It gives you the right definition and it is divided in difference sections.

I am really glad that I bought it!

I use the Garmin etrex handheld GPS navigator almost daily. Navigating is easy and I enoy the simplicity of it. My only complaint is that the map is fairly unsophistcated, but it is not necessary for my needs right now.

This book is partitioned with multiple sections for learning Hebrew vocabulary, including frequency or words and by Hebrew root. For learning large portions of Hebrew vocabulary quickly, learning words sharing the same root is the most efficient method of acquiring Hebrew vocabulary proficiency. This feature, along with checking frequency of occurrence, is the strongest strength of this book.

What may surprise the user of this book is the relatively small amount of vocabulary needed to be learned to recognize a large portion of the Hebrew text.

For additional memory helps in learning Hebrew vocabulary very quickly I would recommend Biblical Hebrew: Vocabulary Made Easy! that provides memory helps or "mnemonics" for each words to learn Hebrew vocabulary quickly with a minimum of time and effort.

What a great resource. This great tool is a Hebrew Bible word list in various forms. It is the book that gives me fits because there's always a vocabulary quiz coming out of it every day for class.

3 times I returned this product and each time they sent a replacement it was damaged. The spine was pulling away from the binding. It makes me wonder if Amazon offers such low prices on books because they are "seconds."