Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Biblical Hebrew Complete Course

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I don't know where to begin. Unorganised layout; the most difficult to follow beginners book I've ever read; full of phonetical blunders and inadecuate/inaccurate pronunciation guides; a mixture of patronising explanations and way-over-my-head technical vocabulary (without explanation, incidentally); too few illustrations along the way, and not enough exercises to practice what you've barely learned. I'm now looking for a Hebrew book in the style of Wenham's 'elements of new testament greek'. Look for an old style grammar/instruction book of the language, don't go for new-look books.

"Teach Yourself Biblical Hebrew" CAN get you started, but within a short period, its shortcomings become very obvious. There is accurate, if often very simplified information, but this book is not well organized, not very well presented, and exercises and examples are generally insufficient. Moreover, the limited vocabulary is antiquated. Do we really need a 'hither' and 'thither' kind of book in the 21st Century?

If you're considering this book you would do MUCH better with Page Kelley's "Biblical Hebrew: An Introductory Grammar". It retails for twice the price, but quantitatively you get approximately four times more book, ample exercises and examples, modern usage, and you are plunged immediately into biblical texts.

This book is well-organized and thorough, but I feel that the only things that allowed me to benefit from it were (1) having studied the language in Hebrew school as a child, and (2) haivng a Master's degree in linguistics and experience learning many different languages.. Unless you are familiar with notions like declension, conjugation, mood, and aspect, using this book will seem like learning one foreign language via another. But if you have some background in Latin or Greek, you can pick up fair amount from this book in a relatively short time.

I would not recommend this book for anyone without any prior knowledge of the Hebrew alef-bet. It tries to make many distinctions between sounds that ultimately have the same pronunciation. It is very confusing and long-winded. For an apt book on learning to read Hebrew, try: "Learn Hebrew Today: Alef-Bet for Adults" by Paul Michael Yedwab and Howard I. Bogot.

I cannot recommend this as a "teach yourself" text. You would be better off starting ANYwhere else.

I bought this book because it was cheap, and I thought I could get an idea of the language from it. Everything that the other reviewers say is true. The only new thing that I want to add is that the printing is so poor and blurred that it is impossible sometimes to distinguish the points indicating the different vowels: very frustrating for a beginner. Nevertheless, this book motivated me to buy a better book and to eventually learn enough Hebrew to read some of the Tanakh in the original language. I would recommend Weingreen's "Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew", which is concise, clear, and has plenty of exercises. Kelley's book seems also very good, but I don't own it.

I have studied Hebrew on and off since 1984. This book would be extremely difficult to understand for a beginner. I would not recommend this book. There is nothing wrong with buying a children's primer to start your study in Hebrew and gradually move on to more advanced teaching. This book is not the one to "Teach Yourself Biblical Hebrew".

I read the reviews here on Amazon, and thought to myself "This book can't be that bad, can it?". So I borrowed it from the library... and then found out for myself that I was so wrong! Yes, it really IS that bad. Consider yourself warned :O) Now, for someone who already has some background in Hebrew, this might be a good reference work to have on their shelf. But if youre a beginner, do yourself a favor and skip this one. Instead, I'd recommend "Learn Biblical Hebrew", by John H Dobson.

This book is utterly impossible to understand if one is unfamiliar with many linguistic terms. Even with a firm background in both Latin and Greek, not to mention four other languages, I still found the book quite impossible to follow and incompetent in its explanations. It is far more useful as a supplement to an academic course than anything else.