שָׁלוֹם from Atlantic Canada!

[Kenneth Greifer]

Hi Thomas,

Have you looked at Paul Overland's or Robert Holmstedt's beginning textbooks? They are departures from the usual grammar-translation approach in some ways. I've seen samples of each and have Overland's book in Logos. Both are more user-friendly than most modern grammars for BH I've seen/read reviews about. Overland also has a book covering conversation BH classroom phrases on various topics. This might be a good supplement to the Aleph with Beth classroom vocabulary videos.

The Joseph story is a great reading choice. Another good option is a short book like Jonah or Ruth. Linga Deo Gloria has some good editions aimed at beginning/intermediate Hebrew readers for both these books. One nice feature they provide is pictures of key vocab in the margin, with glosses in Hebrew.

You can see and download these at https://www.linguadeogloria.com/books. They call these Visual Readers, which is correct. The same site also has several Greek resources for Koine.

I would love to have a book like the books "201 Hebrew Verbs" or "501 Hebrew Verbs" that have many fully conjugated that are used in Biblical and Modern Hebrew, but I would like if someone wrote a book with hundreds of Biblical Hebrew Verbs fully conjugated without modern ones too. I think that kind of book would be very popular with Bible students. Most grammar books have many lists of verb conjugations, but they are spread out throughout their books and then they have some sample lists at the end. I want the full conjugations of verbs in alphabetic order, even if those forms are not actually used in the Hebrew Bible. I think this would help people a lot.

Kenneth Greifer

[Thomas Dolhanty]

Thanks for the suggestions, Dewayne. I'm going to keep my response quite brief, because I want to move this discussion to the "Teaching and Learning" forum.

Have you looked at Paul Overland's or Robert Holmstedt's beginning textbooks? They are departures from the usual grammar-translation approach in some ways. I've seen samples of each and have Overland's book in Logos. Both are more user-friendly than most modern grammars for BH I've seen/read reviews about. Overland also has a book covering conversation BH classroom phrases on various topics. This might be a good supplement to the Aleph with Beth classroom vocabulary videos.

I should say that I'm still thinking this through - just how to put together the next step for students who've completed the Aleph with Beth program. It's a bit of a reverse from the typical order of development. In the typical Biblical language course you spend almost all your energy in the first year gaining information about the language, and then, in the intermediate year and beyond, you are moving towards actual experience with the text itself. Here, you gain real experience from the get-go with the Hebrew language - including a very impressive volume and range of actual Biblical text - but still need to formalize and codify your understanding of formal language parameters (rules of grammar, how the verbal system works, nomenclature, lexical considerations, character of BH script, and so on). I think that good reference material will be much more important than more entry level material. In a new post in the pedagogy forum I'm going to try to define the need more precisely.

The Joseph story is a great reading choice. Another good option is a short book like Jonah or Ruth. Linga Deo Gloria has some good editions aimed at beginning/intermediate Hebrew readers for both these books. One nice feature they provide is pictures of key vocab in the margin, with glosses in Hebrew.

For this project Genesis 37 to 50 will be the Biblical text. That ship sailed a while back.