In The Mail – Elementary Hebrew Texts

Woohoo! Hebrew textbooks and Old Testament hermeneutics in the mail. Can’t complain about that. This upcoming semester I’m taking 20400 WW, otherwise known as “Elementary Hebrew”, with Dr. Garrett. There are two textbooks (really a book and an associated workbook), two recommended texts, plus an extra credit book.

So, for text and workbook, and the extra credit, all pictured above, I’ll be working with:

• A Modern Grammar for Biblical Hebrew and
• A Modern Grammar for Biblical Hebrew Workbook and
• The Problem of the Old Testament: Hermeneutical, Schematic & Theological Approaches (Extra Credit)

The “recommended” texts are A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament and Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS). The first I recently picked up cheap at a used book store, in really good condition. Someone even did the much appreciated work of tabbing the book by initial letters! The other, I may go for in the future, but I have Zondervan’s Hebrew and Greek reader from a couple years back, which is the Leningrad Codex (L), and supposedly only slightly different from BHS. I’ll save a couple bucks for now sticking with it. Fairly readable font, too, and I hear the cheaper variations of BHS can be difficult on the eyes – all those tiny lines and dots!

The professor and OTA both highly encouraged going ahead and getting started on the text, even though there are still about 3 weeks until class starts. To that end, they provided the first couple chapters as pdfs, and I have already begun working on chapter 1, with lots of memorization. Starting to load and run through vocabulary with a custom ankiweb deck. Practicing handwriting, letter names, alphabet order, and some initial vocabulary on paper (here is just one sheet of example, of which there are numerous):

So, that’s what I am going to be working on for the near future. How about you?

G