I think you might be right about there being too many grammars. But I still remember vividly getting to second year hebrew and being shocked. There was a pit in my stomach as I felt that my first year hebrew grammar had lied to me. I think we should get rid of all the gimmicky grammars that don’t really have any substance, and then also the seriously out dated ones. And once you do that, there maybe room for another intro-grammar.

I agree with Shawn, it was frustrating feeling like I had been lied to in my second year of Hebrew. At the same time, the fact is that sometimes beginning students need to be lied to. Really, no one needs an intro grammar to tell them all the different ways ? can be used.

I’d be interested in what upcoming grammars you think are going to be worthwhile.

Rob Holmstedt and John Cook are working on an inductive grammar in which they use cartoons and images to get students to learn vocab and interact with biblical narratives from the very beginning. I’ve had a chance to look over a sample and I really liked what I saw.

By the way, Calvin, why the blog silence? I enjoy your reflections.

That’s a very interesting comment from Shawn. It illustrates why we now use Seow at Fuller. Although the instructor has to work to see that students are not overwhelmed at first, they do not suffer that sick feeling as they advance.

I agree with you, Charles.
I will go broke just trying to keep up with all the grammars.
Maybe Holmstedt and Cook will be able to fix the error (or at least questionable) issues in their other grammar. Speaking of which, has “Ancient Hebrew: A Student Grammar’ been published or is it still in the draft stage?

Charles, is this Holmstedt and Cook grammar different from the unpublished grammar available as a PDF on Holmstedt’s website? I’ve looked at that one, and I very much like much of the terminology. Especially the explanation of the weqatal, since I agree with Cook’s categorization of that use of the qatal as expressing contingent modality. But I didn’t see any cartoons, etc, which I think is really a phenomenal idea.

As for the blog silence, it’s entirely an issue of being too busy. It’s our final semester of Master’s work and between school, work, PhD apps, and a few other things blogging time has simply been squeezed out. But, don’t worry I plan to return to blogging soon. Thanks for the encouragement.

Hi Chris, yes, Seow is a good choice to avoid some of the “righteous lies” embedded within most other intro grammars.

Josh and Calvin, the Holmstedt Cook is not published yet (it is completely and fundamentally different than their previous grammar that is on Holmstedt’s site). I think it is a great approach that won’t be right for everyone but I’m excited about its release.

Thank you for linking to my review of Jo Ann Hackett’s book.

I, also, have seen Holmstedt and Cook’s updated version of their inductive grammar. It’s in my “to do” pile to take a closer look. I think it will be worth considering. I am still disappointed by the lack of implementation of technology for some of these textbooks. They still seem shackled to paper. I long for a truly innovative “textbook” that takes full advantage of the capabilities of the eReaders.

Karyn

I’ve seen the blurb on Hackett’s grammar but have not seen the grammar myself, however I identify with much of the sentiment regarding the number of Hebrew grammars out there. I don’t think we’re ever going to find a “silver bullet” when it comes to teaching Hebrew grammar. But I do think the number of grammars allows some clarification on the fact that some are better than others. One thing that amazes me is the dearth of inductive approaches in the grammars although I can see some trending that way in recent publications. I say this because, with a typical deductive approach in a typically limited time frame, students end up with good exposure to grammar in general, including the strong verb, but little exposure to the weak verb system, which is the major challenge for beginning students! In one of the few inductive grammars that are available (one which I now use), Walker-Jones, Hebrew for Biblical Interpretation, describes the dominant approach (and mostly deductive) as “the grammar translation” method and characterizes it as “a method which has no theory.” As a reaction to that approach, he offers an approach built on a better linguistic base, an example of which is to treat the Qal Imperfect as the first verb since it occurs most often. He then follows through by exposing students to weak verbs by the 2nd or 3rd week and exercising them in the whole system throughout much of the course. BTW, a new grammar I have but have yet to examine closely is Brian Webster’s The Cambridge Introduction to Biblical Hebrew with CD Rom. Actually, he describes it as a CD with a book and says he teaches from the CD, displaying some pretty sophisticated technology along the way. Sounds like a promising resource.

I think that an underlying problem with BIBLICAL Hebrew Grammars is that it is Mas(s)oretic Grammar that is taught. On the one hand, most people study Hebrew for the purpose of reading HB (and even these nos. are dwindling!) and the Mas(s)oretes were geniuses. So learning the Mas(s)orates is not so terrible. On the other hand, the Mas(s)oretic Hebrew is a conspicuous construct that one has to be liberated from to read HB. I don’t know if the Cook and Holmstedt grammar is planning to address this issue; if so, I think this would be a promising project. Not only does such an approach avoid the cause for ‘righteous lies’ (referred to above), but also facilitates work in other Semitic languages (Aramaic, Akkadian, Arabic, etc.), which are better represented and much less the result of a tradition-history, relatively speaking.

Charles: Amen to the moratorium.
Shawn: “Lied to”? I call it good pedagogy. Kinda like when my 3 year old asks about sex or death – they’re not quite ready for the details.

Holmstedt is my Semitics professor here in Toronto, and he is an exceptional teacher, so I’m sure anything from his pen (or keyboard, as the case may be…) will be excellent.

One of the reasons there are so many BH textbooks may simply be the fact that those interested in learning it are a much more diverse bunch than those interested in learning, say, Akkadian. The potential Hebrew student can be a graduate student at a secular institution studying ANE history; he/she may be studying for ordination in a confessional setting; he/she may be an interested middle-age person in a church study-group; he/she may be a Jewish person interested in their heritage and equally interested in modern Hebrew. All of these groups have different needs, and what may be helpful or even required in one setting (e.g., a Christian devotional at the beginning of each chapter) would be wholly inappropriate in another. This also affects, of course, at what level the material is presented: the above-mentioned graduate student in ANE history may already have Latin/Greek/Egyptian/Akkadian/whatever under his/her belt, and therefore have a good foundation and ability in languages (particularly ancient languages) on which to build. In addition, he/she would have more demanding goals: the ability to use the language for scholarly research. On the other hand, a person learning the language for pleasure in a Sunday afternoon church group may know no other foreign language than near-forgotten high school Spanish, have other responsibilities preventing in-depth study, and desire only the ability to more intelligently work with the translations and theological commentaries on the Hebrew Bible as a layperson. Obviously, each of these groups will need a radically different textbook.

There’s a similar situation in Latin textbooks: everything from super-demanding courses for those with an excellent background (e.g., Moreland and Fleischer) and heavily simplified courses for those just looking to understand a few legal mottoes. Although, of course, Latin wouldn’t have the issue of “Christian”, “Jewish” and “secular” textbooks.

With languages which are learned for only one purpose — for instance, Akkadian, which is studied basically only by (mostly graduate) students, usually with a solid background in Semitic or at least Classical langauges, and want to learn it solely for the purpose of using it for academic research — there aren’t nearly as many textbooks. I can think of only two, Huehnergard and Caplice, which are used regularly in English-speaking classrooms (and today it’s mostly Huehnergard I think). There just isn’t the great variety of Akkadian students as there is of Hebrew students.

[...] agree with Charles Halton’s sarcasm here. Too bad Karyn Traphagen’s review wasn’t originally posted on groundhog [...]

Richard has hit the nail on the head. The amount and diversity of Hebrew textbooks, I think, is related to the fact that there are so many different types of BH students (and instructors). This is not necessarily a bad thing. There is no one “best” textbook. The choice of a textbook must take into account the goal of the instruction (what will the student actually do with the language once they learn it, what level do they aspire to?), the dynamic between instructor and class, the type of preferred learning (e.g., deductive, inductive) and other individual factors. The key is to be able to assess all the resources and choose what best fits the current need.

I agree that diversity of students and instructors is a factor and as such it is nice to have a selection of grammars to choose from. However, my main point was that almost all (there are one or two exceptions) the new grammars that I am aware of published in the past decade have been rehashes and recapitulations of the same, old deductive approach. How many grammars do we need to choose from? I did a search on Amazon for “biblical Hebrew grammar” and I came up with 215 results. Naturally, not all of these hits will be relevant but let’s say, to be *really* generous, a tenth of them are–that means there are over 20 Hebrew grammars available. I think we have all the diversity in Hebrew instruction more than addressed…

FWIW, the variety of BH textbooks is more function of market size than market diversity. If the Akkadian market were as large as the BH market, there would be more textbooks.

That’s not to deny that market size and diversity are correlated…

I wish there *were* something between Huehnergard and Caplice in depth. I like that Huehnergard answers most student questions, but it is a *lot* of information for a first-timer.

It is not really between Huehnergard and Caplice in depth but I first learned Akkadian on David Marcus’ grammar and was thrown into GAG after that. I still like Marcus’ approach–it is not as detailed as Huehnergard so students will need to supplement with other stuff but it is kind of inductive which I like.

It might be worth another look. I tend to be leery of the inductive approach to ancient languages, but it’s not entirely about my preferences anymore…

[...] imply. I have finally managed to rouse myself from blogging silence due to a comment on one of Charles’ posts. Truth be told, between finishing our final semester at GCTS, applying to PhD programs (more on [...]

When I took first-year Akkadian we moved quickly (in three weeks!!!) through Caplice (just the grammar, without vocab or exercises) and started on Hammurabi in the fourth week. Then the next year we had a new Assyriologist who thought/thinks Caplice is awful and so in second year we basically went through Huehnergard, doing all the grammar again. I think Huehnergard’s an excellent “second year/semester” book in Akkadian because, as Christopher points out, it does answer a lot of student questions.

Nonetheless, my favourite Akkadian learning tool would probably be Borger’s Lesestuecke, which is the one I ended up using to teach myself. I like that it’s both simple enough for the beginner, but also keyed to von Soden so students can begin to learn to use that very important reference tool right from the start.

When I was in Germany the teaching was very much inductive. In my Hittite class, we flew through the grammar in a few weeks and then started reading a text for the rest of the semester. It was obviously slow-going at first but we learned the grammar from the actual texts, and we got used to the necessity of looking up in the reference grammar what we didn’t understand. As far as I understand the introductory Akkadian classes in the department were taught the same way.

Great discussion. When I saw the quote in Karyn’s review of Hackett’s new grammar that she and John Huehnergard “together came up with the term “‘consecutive preterite’” use a “new term” I had a good chuckle.

Compare with her term the following (all easily discovered with Google book search):

“Vav-consecutive preterite” (William Green’s Grammar of the Hebrew Language 1889, p. 334)
“consecutive preterite” (Delitzsch, commentary on Isaiah 1892, vol. 1 p. 94)
“consecutive preterite” (G. R. Driver Problems of the Hebrew Verbal System 1936 p. 138)

Just goes to show that if you wait long enough you can reintroduce obsolete terminology as something “new.”

Nice work, John! I guess the author of Ecclesiastes was right…

Sounds like you should all plan to attend this NAPH session at SBL 2010 Atlanta (from the Call for Papers):
Session Three, the NAPH Methodology session is interested in recently published grammars. Authors and reviewers are invited to participate in a panel examining Hebrew grammars published in the last five years.

I agree with your basic argument – to the making of new Hebrew grammars there is no end, and many grammars are a weariness to the flesh. Hebrew has remained almost exactly the same for thousands of years, teachers have been teaching it for thousands of years, and there is really nothing new. All the different approaches have been tried already. New grammars really just keep publishers making money and keeping careers going. The number of Hebrew grammars is dwarfed only by the number of Greek New Testament grammars.

Charles and Karyn:

Thanks for mentioning our textbook(s). It will indeed be interesting to see who chooses to use the new version. I might take in the NAPH session from a dark corner of the room — it promises to be intertaining.

Hebrew Scholar:
You are, of course, correct that (ancient) Hebrew grammar has not changed in 2000 years. What you overlook, though, is that student learning needs have changed quite a bit. For instance, we cannot assume that students who start Biblical Hebrew have already learned Latin and Greek. This changes our approach significantly. We must also face an increasingly visual and decreasingly oral culture. The areas of the brain that have to be activated for memory to take place have thus shifted. Every couple of generations (at the minimum), pedagogy must be examined anew. The majority of existing Hebrew textbooks do not take all these things into account (or, at least, it’s not done well).

I am waiting for the CoHeLet project to print out their Hebrew grammar book based on CLT.

I am most of the way done with writing an introductory Hebrew grammar. The philosophy behind it can be seen in the following papers:

1. Killing a Dead Language: A Case against Emphasizing Vowel Pointing when Teaching Biblical Hebrew.
http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?articleId=675

2. Breaking Old Paradigms: Further Reflections on Hebrew Pedagogy (just presented at the Central States Society of Biblical Literature meeting, March, 2010).
http://www.springfieldbibleprofessors.org/2009/hebrewbible/index.htm

Make sure to examine the accompanying charts.

I am seriously considering marketing this electronically (PDF) instead of in printed form. I would appreciate any feedback.