Disclaimer: This review is on the 1st edition. I have not as of yet had the opportunity (or extra cash) to buy the 2nd edition. However, from what I’ve seen briefly of the 2nd edition, I don’t think too much of what I say below would change.

I was asked in a blog post to share my thoughts on Biblical Hebrew: A Text and Workbook, by Bonnie Pedrotti Kittel, Victoria Hoffer, & Rebecca Abts Wright, and my comment just became too long, so I figured I’d post about it.

I used Kittel for first year Hebrew as a student in my undergrad and also use it as a teacher (laypeople, at the moment). One of the reasons I decided to use it when teaching is that I loved it as a student. In case you’re confused about the title of my post, we affectionately called the book “Bonnie” in my undergrad (a practice I continue with my students).

The book is very much what the subtitle says: “text and workbook.” It’s not a grammar, and it can’t really be used as one, so if the student wanted a beginning reference grammar he or she would require a supplemental book. However, for first year students I don’t really think that’s necessary. She does have a sizable and easy to read section in the back with all the verbal paradigms, which is nice for reference.

One of the reasons I love Bonnie is because it’s so inductive. Literally, lesson one (after learning the aleph-bet) starts you reading the Hebrew text. While I’ve not looked at every first-year Hebrew textbook out there, so far, Kittel’s is the only one I’ve found that does such a great job of getting you into the text quickly and easily. She accomplishes this by teaching what she feels are the most common elements of Hebrew first, and going on from there.

Now, some who have learned a little bit less inductively (which is most) might find the book to be a bit “disorganized,” but to some extent that is the nature of inductive study. She uses an example text (usually a phrase or sentence) for each lesson which exemplifies the aspects of Hebrew she wants to teach. Lesson One starts with ויאמר יהוה. Yes, she starts with the wayyiqtol 3ms, which is literally EVERYWHERE in the Hebrew Bible. The student doesn’t learn another PGN until several lessons later, and that’s the 3mp – finally, quite a few lessons later she springs the whole prefix paradigm on you. Intermingled are other new aspects – the qatal form, the Pi’el, singular and plural masculine nouns, etc. She almost always introduces a new form, stem, etc in part before she introduces it in full, using only elements the student already knows. Therefore, she might seem to “skip around” a lot – but once again, this isn’t a grammar, it’s a textbook.

It is also very much a workbook. She guides the student step by step through the lesson verse – asking key questions to nudge them in the right direction, making him or her fill in blanks along the way, and introducing new elements as one comes to them in the verse. As the student masters new concepts, she starts saying things like, “of course, you know by now that ….. means/is a _____:” and moves on quickly. Each lesson usually ends with some supplemental grammatical information, exercises (translation, as well as other types) that hammer on the new concepts learned that lesson, and instructions to memorize some more vocab (out of her list found at the back of the book).

She teaches parsing (and everything else) VERY diagnostically, so you could, theoretically, get away without ever memorizingverbal or noun paradigms when using her book (though she does recommend learning some of them throughout the book, she does such a great job there is very little that is required to be memorized). To some extent, how much needs to be memorized depends on the teacher. Nevertheless, her key word is recognize, not memorize. This last bit is one of the reasons I like using it for teaching the layperson: memorizing a ton of paradigms can be very daunting and a major stumbling block, and for just a 1st year reading knowledge of Hebrew, frankly, isn’t necessary.

Finally, at the end of the book she provides notes on reading and translating several handfuls of prolonged biblical texts (mostly narrative, some poetry at the end) that are meant to be worked through when the student reaches a particular lesson and has certain concepts under their belt (they start somewhere between lessons 12 and 19). I didn’t do this in my undergrad, as it’s optional, until after the fact, when I worked through several on my own. These help the student to begin working through longer texts using the knowledge they’ve learned, with some help from Bonnie.

This is not to say that the book doesn’t have it’s faults. There are things that I would change if I were writing a similar textbook (as I hope to do someday, geared for lay people, specifically). But, all-in-all, I still to this day (even though I’ve been shown other books that claim to be inductive) have yet to find a 1st year Hebrew textbook that does quite the job she does of getting a beginning student reading Hebrew quickly, and does it in an enjoyable way.