I have just received my desk copy of a brand new Introductory Hebrew textbook that I will be using come fall. I heard about this fantastic text from a comment on an old blog-poll on Hebrew grammars. After learning with Ross, having a bad year with Fuller & Choi, and almost adopting Kelley, I was very glad to find this gem.

Purchase from Amazon.COM or Amazon.CA
The Cambridge Introduction to Biblical Hebrew
Brain L. Webster
Cambridge University Press, 2009
345 pages

There are a total of 32 chapters in this textbook (see TOC at the end of the post), but it is very important to note that the final 10 chapters discuss more in depth items— what we think of as the “basics” of elementary Hebrew grammar are covered in the first 22 chapters.

What makes this text stand a cut above the rest is the result of several factors. First, Its approach of both using the textbook and technology is unparalleled by any other Hebrew intro grammar. The book comes with a CD-Rom that has, among other things, a program (cross-platform) called TekScroll. This thing is a beauty to behold. It provides animated examples of word changes and vowel changes, provides TONS of drilling exercises, ADDITIONAL translation practice, and basic flashcards. This book ships with its own little Hebrew gymnasium for the student to practice their skills. Their is quite simply NOTHING of comparison to this program TekScroll.
Second, The CD does not just have the program, but comes with a workbook for the student, a full answer key to the workbook, vocabulary lists, ready to print flashcards, and paradigms. No need to go and buy a second accompanying workbook, just print it out for yourself!
Third, its approach is appealing to me. For verbs, it works on a system it calls ID badges and alias profiles. In other words, a verbal stem has a certain ID badge, its default way of being for a strong verb. Then it has a bunch of aliases depending on other conditions. It is a very nice way of approaching the Hebrew verb system.
Fourth, Canada has somewhat shorter semesters which brings with it some challenges for teaching introductory language courses. Webster’s new and innovative method is elegantly packaged into a smaller number of chapters than most textbooks. Yet, it is not crammed in—some chapters are 13 pages long, others are only 6. It fits how I run the course perfectly.

To call this book simply a textbook really does not do this justice— it is an entire learning package for introductory Biblical Hebrew. Students will love this and teachers will too. It is more than worthy to become the new standard in intro Hebrew grammars. Bravo Brian Webster!

Now, just to show that I am of sound mind, I will point out something I don’t like about it— I am not a fan of how Webster introduces Hebrew nouns (ch 3 & 4). He puts a lot of focus on recognizing the 3-radical root of the noun to find it in the lexicon. HALOT doesn’t classify nouns by root— and who looks up words in a paper lexicon anymore anyway But that is about all I got in the way of criticism. If you are teaching intro Hebrew, you out it to your students to check this one out and see if it will fit the way you run your class.

Here is the TOC (with apologies for the lack of Hebrew characters):
Introduction
1. The signs and sounds of Hebrew: orthography and pronunciation
2. Syllables: the structural girders of Hebrew
3. The ’state’ of noun morphology, and also gender and number
4. More noun patterns
5. Prepositions, conjunction, article and interrogative particle, direct object indicator
6. Pronouns: pronominal suffixes on substantives and prepositions
7. Adjectives
8. Participles: infinitive construct
9. Selected words: numbers
10. Introduction to verbs: qal perfect
11. Qal perfect weak verbs
12. Qal imperfect and preterite: strong verbs
13. Qal imperfect and preterite: weak verbs
14. Qal volitionals and infinitive absolute
15. Pronominal suffixes on verbs
16. Derived stems: participles and infinitives
17. I-class imperfect verbs: niphal, piel, hitpael, hiphil
18. I-class imperfects: r3 = weak, r2 = g, r1 = g, r2 = x, r1 = x
19. I-class imperfect weak verbs: r2 = y, r1 = y, r2 = r3, weak imv., inf., and ptc.
20. A-class imperfect verbs: pual, hophal
21. Derived stem perfects: strong verbs, r3 = weak
22. Derived stem perfects: r1 and r2 weak, r2 = r3, rare binyanim
Excursus A: Sorting through forms and alias profiles
Excursus B: A syntax sampler: introduction to chapters 23-32
23. Pauses and drama
24. Lexicography: semantic combinations and the meaning of z
25. Noun syntax
26. Verb syntax: the piel
27. Verb syntax: participles
28. Clausal syntax in narrative: movies in the mind
29. Particles: s and t
30. Infinitives
31. Perfect and vav plus perfect
32. Poetry and time frame
Appendix A: Additional vocabulary lists
Appendix B: Glossary: words used 50+ times in the Hebrew Bible
Appendix C: Paradigms: verb id badges and alias profiles.

I have been dragged around the block a number of times doing scripture indexing and know how tedious it is. Just yesterday a colleague emailed me asking for advice as he is about to start indexing his proof. I have refined my process and have been able to refine what is a big job. Rather than just instructing Rafael in an email, I’ve made it a PDF and have made it available in the Deinde sidebar for any who may find it useful.

A warning: My method requires a Mac and looks complicated at first. I assure you though, the only better alternative to my method is hiring someone else to do it

As many know, I keep pretty good tabs on technology and the internet, especially as it pertains to biblical studies. I have finally found a decent online bookmarks manager from which to share my bookmarks. I will continue to refine my collection, adding more bookmarks, annotations, and list organizations. All bookmarks are tagged in my Diigo collection. Check it out!

I read about academia.edu from some blog (can’t recall who) and immediate saw the benefit and usefulness of the site. I highly recommend it to fellow professors out there. Create your own page, categorized by your university and department, and keep up to date your own personal academic page.

You can check me out here. If you create a page, add me as a friend!

Many years ago Craig Evans made a list of almost 300 (294) Greek verbs and any principal parts that showed up in the NT (with others added too). Over the past while I’ve been working on digitizing this list that only existed on paper and am happy now to share it with anyone who may find it useful.

You can find the list on my Greek Flashcards site, or alternatively you can use the direct link to the Socrata site (formerly blist)

Hope you find it useful!

I’ve created a list of the SBL journal and series abbreviations (something I’ve been meaning to put online for awhile). It is available on deinde in the sidebar, and is shared via the free blist service. The list can be shared on your own site, viewed in a full screen, and even downloaded. Hopefully it will be helpful to some of you.

Please do email me if there are missing abbreviations.

Because you all are dying to know the Mac applications which I use, and because I haven’t posted for a while, here they are:

PRODUCTIVITY AND ORGANIZATION APPS
Launchbar— I’ve recently abandoned quicksilver since it has been abandoned by its creator. But I’ve since fallen in love with Launchbar and actually like it a whole lot better than Quicksilver. If you are a Mac user who wants to do things faster, you’d be nuts not to use this.
The Hit List—I’ve been a GTD’r (Getting Things Done, productivity methodology by David Allen) for 2 years now and have used a number of the organizational apps (kGTD, iGTD, Actiontastic, OmniFocus) and have very recently fallen in love with The Hit List (thankyou MacHeist!!). This is my hands down favorite. It is aesthetically pleasing, simple to use, and very intuitive. And an iPhone version is coming, which is essential for me.
MacSpeech Dictate—I remember trying a speech to text app a few years back and it sucked. MacSpeech Dictate delivers the goods. Especially useful for emails and notetaking.
TextExpander— I take minutes for meetings, which is when TextExpander really comes in handy. Create short key combinations and have them instantly expand. TextExpander comes in handy for any really repetitive tasks.
Bento—Basically a fancy excel sheet, Bento is a handy storage place for many items. I keep my books to buy list, office inventory, tech inventory, and work logs.
Wallet— I’m testing out Wallet right now, but really like it as a place to store confidential info and passwords. Probably a keeper.

WEBSITE, PICTURES, AND OTHER MEDIA
Sandvox—You can be a complete computer moron and still create nice looking sites with Sandvox. Simple and intuitive. I currently run the Acadia Divinity College website with Sandvox. The next evolution of the site will be a little brighter so I’ll make the switch to RapidWeaver.
Espresso— For those times I actually need to wade through html code, Espresso is great.
LittleSnapper— I don’t like keeping miscellaneous photos alongside my family photos in iPhoto. LittleSnapper is the perfect sidekick to iPhoto.
Acorn— I occasionally need to jump into more detailed picture editing. Instead of blowing hundreds on Photoshop, just use Acorn.
ScreenFlow— ScreenFlow records your screen, your computer’s sound, a microphone and you with a camera all at the same time. Then you can edit it to make great looking screencasts or lessons. ScreenFlow has been a godsend for online learning.
VisualHub— I can’t believe this amazing video conversion app is not being developed. It continues to work great and is unmatched.
OmniGraffle— A great drawing program and mindmapping program.

RESEARCH, WRITING, TEACHING
Accordance— Duh!
Webnote— I keep pretty good tabs on the internet if I do say so myself. But it isn’t all in my head. I have close to 1200 URL’s in a program called Webnote. Each URL is tagged with keywords, along with an introductory note attached.
Mellel— Mellel is used solely for my academic writing purposes, or any time I need to use unicode Hebrew.
Pages— Pages is a such a great word processor, I use it for everything except my academic papers, as it can’t handle unicode Hebrew. I can’t even remember what MS Word looks like anymore.
Bookends— Still going strong with Bookends. Fast, reliable, and constantly updated. I envision myself moving to Sente someday, but for now Bookends continues to do its job with excellence.
Skim— Skim is the world’s best PDF reader, bar none. Take intelligent notes on PDFs. A bonus to Skim, it is now part of my workflow for creating scripture and names indexes and saves me a bunch of time.
DEVONthink Pro Office— Every journal article and essay I have that is not in book form is digitized with devonthink. I can do a full text search of every article I have! DEVONthink is an amazing database that I highly recommend for intelligently keeping all of your stuff organized and accessible.
Mental Case— While I have been using iFlash for quite some time, its development is dreadfully slow. Mental Case has it beat. My flashcard packs which I sell will eventually be migrated over to Mental Case, and it will be my new recommendation for my Mac students. And it comes on the iPhone too!

If you’ve made it to the end, you’re a trooper!

A while back I posted my Greek alphabet musical video to wild fanfare (not really). One comment I got (which I also received from Bill Mounce) was that I pronounce Ï€ as “pie”, not “pee”— but φ is “fee”, ψ is “psee”, …. you get the point.

I’m wondering, how many others say “pie” rather than “pee”. And is it really that bad to say “pie”? Everyone knows that sign from mathematics- why not just stick with how they know to pronounce it? What are your thoughts on this most important Greek issue of our generation.

I’ve just been made aware of an excellent Greek unicode font that is the most thorough I have ever come across. Designed for the papyrologist and text-critical scholar in mind. The font is called IFAO-Grec and can be downloaded at the bottom of this page. You will see also a documentation page, which lists all of the extra characters available.

Some time back Mark Goodacre did a poll on intro Greek grammars. Mounce was the clear winner, with N. Clayton Croy’s grammar being in second. I thought it was time the same thing was done for intro Hebrew grammars.

As I am now in the midst of teaching Hebrew, it has become apparent to me that I, most unfortunately, made the wrong textbook choice for my students (I’m sure many teachers can relate to this). While it does have some strengths, I have just not been happy with Fuller and Choi’s Invitation to Biblical Hebrew. It is so focused on composition, which is just not how I teach ancient languages.

Anyhow, as I prepare for teaching Hebrew again next year, I thought I would see what others are using and created a poll. Please vote— and if I missed a grammar please add it to the poll.