LIBRONIX SOFTWARE

After over a year with this book, I am glad to say I've finished it!

Advantages of Kelley's book:
I love how he combed through the Bible and found actual verses for the exercises in each chapter. It gives a feeling of authenticity to the book, and the joy of working through the Bible rather than fabricated textbook examples. Each chapter has a LOT of helpful exercises of many different kinds, particularly verb identification. There is also an answer key (sold separately) which makes this book ideal for self-study.

Disadvantages:
I thought the way he handled weak verbs was unhelpful. His book is very step-by-step: he teaches almost everything about nouns, then moves into verbs, then weak verbs. So there are 10 chapters at the end of the book that focus on weak verbs alone. Some of these chapters were unnecessary, such as certain types of weak verbs that don't lose any of their root consonants - only the vowels change, but one can intuit these pretty easily. Other chapters he overcomplicated immensely, focusing on intricate phonological rules that don't seem necessary to understand biblical Hebrew.

Given the verbs are the most difficult thing about Hebrew morphology, I feel he should have introduced them from the get-go, introducing individual weak verbs along the way and treating them as special irregular cases. Then one is dealing with strong and weak verbs while learning everything else rather than slapping them all at the end of the textbook.

Accompanied by: A handbook to Biblical Hebrew, an introductory grammar. Grand Rapids, Mich. : Eerdmans, c1994. ( )