Biblical Hebrew: A Text and Workbook (Yale Language Series)
by Bonnie Pedrotti Kittel
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List Price: $45.00
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Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 492.482421
EAN: 9780300043945
ISBN: 0300043945
Label: Yale University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 429
Publication Date: 1989-09-10
Publisher: Yale University Press
Studio: Yale University Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A motivating book with authentic material
Comment: To be honest I used this book several years ago in university, and I didn't bring it to my current place of residence so I'm reviewing it strictly from memory. More than anything I remember being excited to open this book because at every point in the book you are learning authentic Hebrew passages that appear in the Bible. As many reviewers have pointed out, it uses an inductive method of only introducing grammar that arises in the passage currently being studied, and introduces the most commonly recurring structures first. I clearly remember the moment that we completed studying chapter 1 in class, my professor said "Congratulations. You can now read 4% of the entire Hebrew Bible." If I remember correctly, chapter 1 teaches only 2 words: "vayomer adonai" ("And the Lord said"). I was suitably impressed!
Another thing I remember is that all the practice sentences in the exercises are also taken from real Biblical passages with their Book/Chapter/Verse reference given. That did cause some confusion at times, because Biblical Hebrew doesn't always conform to the same syntactic conventions, so some of the sentences were a bit of a mystery to me as a beginner. But again that is preparation for reading the real Hebrew Bible, preparation that you won't get from a deductive grammar.
I enjoyed using this book and it gave me the confidence to pick up my Hebrew Bible and start delving into more complex passages on my own. My only complaint is that my dog chewed up the cover so it looks a bit funny.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A smart way to learn Hebrew
Comment: This is a large book with a sturdy cover, very pleasant to handle. The font is clear, the text well ventilated.
The whole approach is highly imaginative and stimulating. Instead of just throwing heaps of vocabulary and verbs at your face, the author takes one Biblical sentence(all the material covered in the book is Biblical!) and analyses it with great accuracy and refinement, all the while asking you very intelligent questions, so that there is a real dialogue between you and the book. This I find the most outstanding feature of this manual.
The only flaws are the fact that you have to buy an inordinately expensive answer book plus a Hebrew Bible in order to be able to fully use it.
The second part of the manual is a guided reading of Biblical passages, so that this grammar is also a Biblical reader for beginners.
Customer Rating:
Summary: an excellent text for learning
Comment: Being primarily a self-taught student, I really liked this grammar. It has a few drawbacks that would apply to other independent learners like me (unfortunately it seems there is no escaping this no matter where you turn). But on the whole it measures up to the highest standards, and somehow even possesses a kind of gracefulness, which is a strange thing to say about a grammar. I imagine the author as a charming and extremely intelligent and gifted teacher, if her book has anything to say about her.
This grammar begins with the most frequent verbal constructions and provides useful clues for recognizing and analyzing them. Each chapter ("lesson") is taught through a real phrase or sentence from Scripture, illustrating the grammatical form of the lesson. Basically this is an "inductive" or "tutorial" approach. I think it is appealing to students who are in danger of being bored to death by exercises and charts. She has a nice way of finding helpful clues to get you thinking your way through trouble spots, mostly in terms of recognizing so-called weak letters ("missing letter rules"; "footprint dagesh"; "traveling dagesh"; "dot vowel" characteristics, etc.), and offers useful grammatical tips that make a big difference (this is where she really seems like a teacher who is "with you" while you study). Later lessons reinforce earlier ones. by the end you will have worked through, word by word and verse by verse, all these passages: Gen 22:1-14; Gen 28:10-29:11; Ex 3:1-17; Gen 37:1-24; Deut 6:1-25; 1 Kgs 17:1-24; 1 Kgs 18:20-46; 1 Kgs 19:1-21; Ps 24; and Ps 100. Quite an accomplishment!
a negative is that the book seems to presuppose a classroom setting (even though it is very thorough in its explanations -- almost as if it were a transcript of an actual class). Therefore, in cases where Kittel provides a paradigm for you, often you need to "fill it out" yourself, and this can leave you with an uneasy feeling since you probably (at least once) would like to "see" it. There are full paradigms in the back of the book but they are always confusing to beginning students. It would help to have another grammar for an occasional take on the "complete" picture of a certain stem (Qal, Piel, Nifal, etc.). With this book, you may find you need to stop every now and then and just practice a single verb construction for a few days.
One tip: if you are a complete beginner without a teacher and tutor and you find Hebrew completely frightening, work through "The First Hebrew Primer" by Simon et al. It will open all the doors for you, and you'll be able to tackle the other grammars from there. And finally, I can say that I've used about four or five Hebrew grammars to help me learn and get practice, but this one by Kittel is the only one I've worked through page by page, learning all she has to teach and doing all the translation work and exercises. I hope some other students will be inspired to do the same, as this is what it is really designed to do.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best textbook in Reading the Hebrew Scriptures early
Comment: This is THE best Hebrew textbook in learning how to read the Hebrew scriptures early and with ease. Why? Because you get to read 10 major Hebrew passages with the help of annotations (You need your own Hebrew Bible of course). These 10 passages alone are enough to take this book. This book has the most annotated passage reading compared to any other book. In fact, virtually all other Hebrew textbooks don't have any passage reading at all. The only other one that has annotated passage reading is Ehud Ben Zvi's 2nd year's "Readings in Biblical Hebrew: An Intermediate Textbook," published by the same University (but I think that it's not as good as Kittel's readings because most passages are only several verses long, so I was a bit disappointed with that). After you complete Kittel's textbook, you will have mastered the following major biblical passages:
Gen. 22:1-14
Gen. 28:10 to 29:11
Exo. 3:1-17
Gen. 37:1-24
Deut. 6:1-25
1Kings 17:1-24
1Kings 18:20-46
1Kings 19:1-21
Psa. 24:1-10
Psa. 100:1-5
We need to face the facts, the only way one is really going to know how to read the Hebrew scriptures is to READ the Hebrew scriptures. Any textbook that does not have many and major passage readings like Kittel's should be avoided. You cannot improve substantially in your Hebrew understanding if all you're doing is learning the grammar and translating different individual verses all the time in each chapter. Passage reading will do this because then you will know how to translate and understand the passage in its entire CONTEXT. Each verse will then flow smoothly and contextually into the next verse. This is THE most important thing.
I must say that I learned how to READ Hebrew quite quickly was because of this textbook's over 100-pages annotation of the above 10 major passages that helps you how to translate the passages, and explains potentially difficult grammatical constructions. One example that really caught my attention was the author's comment on Gen. 22:2 where it is traditionally said, "Take your son, your only one..." However, the author argues that if one were to translate it literally, by what the root Yod, Chet, Dalet means, then it should be rendered, "Take your son, the one with whom you are one..." In this context, with the relationship of Abraham's TWO sons, I find this quite convincing, for the connotation is then not of a quantitative relationship, but rather, more appropriately, of a qualitative relationship between father and son ("whom you love..."), and this would also give its great antitypical significance "I and the Father are one." (Jn. 10:30). Is it harder to sacrifice your only son, or the son with whom you are one?
There are 55 lessons, and each lesson focuses on at least one new grammatical element from the verse topic sentence, so if you are one that likes to learn things iteratively, rather than, say, learning all the Hebrew stems in one chapter, or all the Hebrew forms in one setting, then this book is for you. I don't mind it actually since by the time you finish all 55 chapters, you will have had all the major Hebrew grammar. Also, every Hebrew sentence that you translate in each lesson is directly from the Bible, so you get hands-on experience with genuine material right from the beginning. If you see a textbook that has mostly made-up Hebrew sentences, likewise they should be avoided. If you get Kelley's comprehensive grammar reference (Biblical Hebrew: An Introductory Grammar) as a companion to Kittel, you are then well on your way to mastering Biblical Hebrew.
On lesson 54 you will have finished the first eight passages. Then on the last chapter, lesson 55, is an introduction to Hebrew poetry and its terminologies, and gives an annotated walkthrough of Psalms 24 and 100. Now it is said that if one understands and masters the grammatical content of 1 Kings 17, 18 and 19, then you basically have the capability to translate just about any scripture passage. Therefore, getting this textbook is a must. It is good that The University of British Columbia is currently using this textbook.
Of course, all Hebrew textbooks have their shares of errors, and this textbook is no exception, you will just have to have a keen instructor to point it out for you. One example is on page 65, Lesson 14, where it says:
"In a construct chain the absolute noun may be modified by an attributive adjective, but construct nouns cannot be so modified."
This is simply not true, the construct noun can indeed be modified by an attributive adjective, for example, in Hebrew you have, "THIS MASTER of the dreams is coming." (Gen. 37:19), since "this" is singular that corresponds to "master" which is also singular, while "dreams" is plural. All this textbook needs is an update (first published in 1989), so hopefully many people will start asking Yale University to hurry up with one.
I gave this book five stars because, even though it has mistakes in the book, like I said before, I cannot stress enough that the annotated passage reading alone is enough to get this book, and I can guarantee that you'll actually start enjoying reading the Hebrew scriptures from them, and then eventually you probably wouldn't have the desire to read your English Bibles ever again, like me... :P
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent text for a beginner in Hebrew
Comment: I have used this book as the primary text book in an introductory Biblical Hebrew course at the seminary level and I believe it has helped me develop an excitement for and a proficiency at reading Hebrew faster than another text would have.
As another reviewer has pointed out, this book does not follow the traditional layout of a grammar textbook. Rather than slowly build from the simplest constructions to the more complicated, this book teaches grammar as well as vocabulary in the order of its frequency in the Bible. This technique has the advantage of getting you to the point of reading the Bible (which is why we're doing this in the first place) faster than you otherwise could. The disadvantage, as pointed out before, is that you may not grasp the subtleties of the more complicated, but more frequent, constructions until later in the book. I think that's a worthwhile trade-off. By the end of the course you will still have covered the same material at the same depth as in another course, but this text gets you reading real material sooner, which is advantageous in holding a student's interest in learning a classical language.
In sum, of the introductory Hebrew grammars I've seen, I would recommend this book most strongly to anyone wishing to learn to read the Hebrew Bible. This book does an excellent job of getting the beginning student to the level where they can comfortably read biblical prose and are ready for more advanced grammatical study.
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Editorial Reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: A motivating book with authentic material
Comment: To be honest I used this book several years ago in university, and I didn't bring it to my current place of residence so I'm reviewing it strictly from memory. More than anything I remember being excited to open this book because at every point in the book you are learning authentic Hebrew passages that appear in the Bible. As many reviewers have pointed out, it uses an inductive method of only introducing grammar that arises in the passage currently being studied, and introduces the most commonly recurring structures first. I clearly remember the moment that we completed studying chapter 1 in class, my professor said "Congratulations. You can now read 4% of the entire Hebrew Bible." If I remember correctly, chapter 1 teaches only 2 words: "vayomer adonai" ("And the Lord said"). I was suitably impressed!
Another thing I remember is that all the practice sentences in the exercises are also taken from real Biblical passages with their Book/Chapter/Verse reference given. That did cause some confusion at times, because Biblical Hebrew doesn't always conform to the same syntactic conventions, so some of the sentences were a bit of a mystery to me as a beginner. But again that is preparation for reading the real Hebrew Bible, preparation that you won't get from a deductive grammar.
I enjoyed using this book and it gave me the confidence to pick up my Hebrew Bible and start delving into more complex passages on my own. My only complaint is that my dog chewed up the cover so it looks a bit funny.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A smart way to learn Hebrew
Comment: This is a large book with a sturdy cover, very pleasant to handle. The font is clear, the text well ventilated.
The whole approach is highly imaginative and stimulating. Instead of just throwing heaps of vocabulary and verbs at your face, the author takes one Biblical sentence(all the material covered in the book is Biblical!) and analyses it with great accuracy and refinement, all the while asking you very intelligent questions, so that there is a real dialogue between you and the book. This I find the most outstanding feature of this manual.
The only flaws are the fact that you have to buy an inordinately expensive answer book plus a Hebrew Bible in order to be able to fully use it.
The second part of the manual is a guided reading of Biblical passages, so that this grammar is also a Biblical reader for beginners.
Customer Rating:
Summary: an excellent text for learning
Comment: Being primarily a self-taught student, I really liked this grammar. It has a few drawbacks that would apply to other independent learners like me (unfortunately it seems there is no escaping this no matter where you turn). But on the whole it measures up to the highest standards, and somehow even possesses a kind of gracefulness, which is a strange thing to say about a grammar. I imagine the author as a charming and extremely intelligent and gifted teacher, if her book has anything to say about her.
This grammar begins with the most frequent verbal constructions and provides useful clues for recognizing and analyzing them. Each chapter ("lesson") is taught through a real phrase or sentence from Scripture, illustrating the grammatical form of the lesson. Basically this is an "inductive" or "tutorial" approach. I think it is appealing to students who are in danger of being bored to death by exercises and charts. She has a nice way of finding helpful clues to get you thinking your way through trouble spots, mostly in terms of recognizing so-called weak letters ("missing letter rules"; "footprint dagesh"; "traveling dagesh"; "dot vowel" characteristics, etc.), and offers useful grammatical tips that make a big difference (this is where she really seems like a teacher who is "with you" while you study). Later lessons reinforce earlier ones. by the end you will have worked through, word by word and verse by verse, all these passages: Gen 22:1-14; Gen 28:10-29:11; Ex 3:1-17; Gen 37:1-24; Deut 6:1-25; 1 Kgs 17:1-24; 1 Kgs 18:20-46; 1 Kgs 19:1-21; Ps 24; and Ps 100. Quite an accomplishment!
a negative is that the book seems to presuppose a classroom setting (even though it is very thorough in its explanations -- almost as if it were a transcript of an actual class). Therefore, in cases where Kittel provides a paradigm for you, often you need to "fill it out" yourself, and this can leave you with an uneasy feeling since you probably (at least once) would like to "see" it. There are full paradigms in the back of the book but they are always confusing to beginning students. It would help to have another grammar for an occasional take on the "complete" picture of a certain stem (Qal, Piel, Nifal, etc.). With this book, you may find you need to stop every now and then and just practice a single verb construction for a few days.
One tip: if you are a complete beginner without a teacher and tutor and you find Hebrew completely frightening, work through "The First Hebrew Primer" by Simon et al. It will open all the doors for you, and you'll be able to tackle the other grammars from there. And finally, I can say that I've used about four or five Hebrew grammars to help me learn and get practice, but this one by Kittel is the only one I've worked through page by page, learning all she has to teach and doing all the translation work and exercises. I hope some other students will be inspired to do the same, as this is what it is really designed to do.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best textbook in Reading the Hebrew Scriptures early
Comment: This is THE best Hebrew textbook in learning how to read the Hebrew scriptures early and with ease. Why? Because you get to read 10 major Hebrew passages with the help of annotations (You need your own Hebrew Bible of course). These 10 passages alone are enough to take this book. This book has the most annotated passage reading compared to any other book. In fact, virtually all other Hebrew textbooks don't have any passage reading at all. The only other one that has annotated passage reading is Ehud Ben Zvi's 2nd year's "Readings in Biblical Hebrew: An Intermediate Textbook," published by the same University (but I think that it's not as good as Kittel's readings because most passages are only several verses long, so I was a bit disappointed with that). After you complete Kittel's textbook, you will have mastered the following major biblical passages:
Gen. 22:1-14
Gen. 28:10 to 29:11
Exo. 3:1-17
Gen. 37:1-24
Deut. 6:1-25
1Kings 17:1-24
1Kings 18:20-46
1Kings 19:1-21
Psa. 24:1-10
Psa. 100:1-5
We need to face the facts, the only way one is really going to know how to read the Hebrew scriptures is to READ the Hebrew scriptures. Any textbook that does not have many and major passage readings like Kittel's should be avoided. You cannot improve substantially in your Hebrew understanding if all you're doing is learning the grammar and translating different individual verses all the time in each chapter. Passage reading will do this because then you will know how to translate and understand the passage in its entire CONTEXT. Each verse will then flow smoothly and contextually into the next verse. This is THE most important thing.
I must say that I learned how to READ Hebrew quite quickly was because of this textbook's over 100-pages annotation of the above 10 major passages that helps you how to translate the passages, and explains potentially difficult grammatical constructions. One example that really caught my attention was the author's comment on Gen. 22:2 where it is traditionally said, "Take your son, your only one..." However, the author argues that if one were to translate it literally, by what the root Yod, Chet, Dalet means, then it should be rendered, "Take your son, the one with whom you are one..." In this context, with the relationship of Abraham's TWO sons, I find this quite convincing, for the connotation is then not of a quantitative relationship, but rather, more appropriately, of a qualitative relationship between father and son ("whom you love..."), and this would also give its great antitypical significance "I and the Father are one." (Jn. 10:30). Is it harder to sacrifice your only son, or the son with whom you are one?
There are 55 lessons, and each lesson focuses on at least one new grammatical element from the verse topic sentence, so if you are one that likes to learn things iteratively, rather than, say, learning all the Hebrew stems in one chapter, or all the Hebrew forms in one setting, then this book is for you. I don't mind it actually since by the time you finish all 55 chapters, you will have had all the major Hebrew grammar. Also, every Hebrew sentence that you translate in each lesson is directly from the Bible, so you get hands-on experience with genuine material right from the beginning. If you see a textbook that has mostly made-up Hebrew sentences, likewise they should be avoided. If you get Kelley's comprehensive grammar reference (Biblical Hebrew: An Introductory Grammar) as a companion to Kittel, you are then well on your way to mastering Biblical Hebrew.
On lesson 54 you will have finished the first eight passages. Then on the last chapter, lesson 55, is an introduction to Hebrew poetry and its terminologies, and gives an annotated walkthrough of Psalms 24 and 100. Now it is said that if one understands and masters the grammatical content of 1 Kings 17, 18 and 19, then you basically have the capability to translate just about any scripture passage. Therefore, getting this textbook is a must. It is good that The University of British Columbia is currently using this textbook.
Of course, all Hebrew textbooks have their shares of errors, and this textbook is no exception, you will just have to have a keen instructor to point it out for you. One example is on page 65, Lesson 14, where it says:
"In a construct chain the absolute noun may be modified by an attributive adjective, but construct nouns cannot be so modified."
This is simply not true, the construct noun can indeed be modified by an attributive adjective, for example, in Hebrew you have, "THIS MASTER of the dreams is coming." (Gen. 37:19), since "this" is singular that corresponds to "master" which is also singular, while "dreams" is plural. All this textbook needs is an update (first published in 1989), so hopefully many people will start asking Yale University to hurry up with one.
I gave this book five stars because, even though it has mistakes in the book, like I said before, I cannot stress enough that the annotated passage reading alone is enough to get this book, and I can guarantee that you'll actually start enjoying reading the Hebrew scriptures from them, and then eventually you probably wouldn't have the desire to read your English Bibles ever again, like me... :P
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent text for a beginner in Hebrew
Comment: I have used this book as the primary text book in an introductory Biblical Hebrew course at the seminary level and I believe it has helped me develop an excitement for and a proficiency at reading Hebrew faster than another text would have.
As another reviewer has pointed out, this book does not follow the traditional layout of a grammar textbook. Rather than slowly build from the simplest constructions to the more complicated, this book teaches grammar as well as vocabulary in the order of its frequency in the Bible. This technique has the advantage of getting you to the point of reading the Bible (which is why we're doing this in the first place) faster than you otherwise could. The disadvantage, as pointed out before, is that you may not grasp the subtleties of the more complicated, but more frequent, constructions until later in the book. I think that's a worthwhile trade-off. By the end of the course you will still have covered the same material at the same depth as in another course, but this text gets you reading real material sooner, which is advantageous in holding a student's interest in learning a classical language.
In sum, of the introductory Hebrew grammars I've seen, I would recommend this book most strongly to anyone wishing to learn to read the Hebrew Bible. This book does an excellent job of getting the beginning student to the level where they can comfortably read biblical prose and are ready for more advanced grammatical study.
A textbook for a two-semester course. Each of 55 lessons is built around a biblical verse or segment that generates the grammatical concepts to be taught. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
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