Biblical Hebrew: An Introductory Grammar.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.

Another textbook of Biblical Hebrew (complete with the usual types of exercises) joins a crowded field: from Jacob Weingreen, A Practical Grammar of Classical Hebrew (2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1934) to Bonnie Pedrotti Kittel, Vicki Hoffer, and Rebecca Abts Wright, Biblical Hebrew: A Text and Workbook (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989). Unfortunately, this book is not better than its predecessors.

The volume contains a vocabulary, alphabetically arranged (pp. 374-99), which gives alternate spellings such as

and 'turtle-dove' (p. 399); yet it does not present the very common allomorph [[Epsilon][Theta]] 'sign of the direct object' for the listed [e[Theta]] (p. 375). Full verb paradigms are presented (pp. 400-423), as is the custom of so many grammars. The glossary (pp. 424-47) sets the tone for the entire book. It notes that, apparently, only verb roots are biconsonantal (p. 427); yet biconsonantal nouns, such as sem 'name' and ben 'son', occur (but are not, unfortunately, given biconsonantal status). We read that the Semitic languages include "Akkadian, Syriac-Aramaean, Canaanite, Moabite, [and] Phoenician" (p. 432). Canaanite, however, is not the name of any single attested Semitic language. Furthermore, Phoenician and Moabite are Canaanite languages. That the author defines a noun as "a word used to denote a person, place, or thing" (p. 438) is perhaps more indicative of the level of today's students rather than any attempt by the author to perpetuate this very traditional but totally inadequate definition.

Comments on specific points follow.

P. 2. The author states that alef "is always a consonant." However, this is not so in a word such as ros 'head', or qara 'he read', in which the alef is not pronounced as a glottal stop. These are, of course, historical spellings.

P. 12. [Hebrew Text Omitted] as in [Hebrew Text Omitted] hayyom 'all day' is not a qames-hatuf, but rather a qames-qatan.

P. 36. Kelly notes that "the vast majority of Hebrew nouns are derived from...