66 Theological librarianship • Vol. 12, No. 1 april 2019

Unfortunately, linguistic analysis of Hebrew morphology has received the same intense focus as syntax has—and this book also reflects such comparative lack of interest. The morphology sections of this work are adequate. They are generally accurate and helpful, but they do not reach the same competency as Bauer and Leander or Gesenius’s presentation.1 One frustrating aspect of this presentation is that when presenting ungrammatical forms, the authors do not indicate them as such. For example, the authors write:

יֹאמַר instead of יִאְמֹר

This layout suffers from requiring the reader to switch reading directions in the midst of the line, which adds to the confusion and lack of clarity. Traditionally, ungrammatical forms are identified with two asterisks; their absence in this work is suprising.

Hebrew nouns can be classified by vocal patterns that have discernible semantic value, yet the authors skip over them. The intermediate student is in the ideal position to start learning these patterns, not only for her understanding of grammar, but also for the expansion of her vocabulary. Waltke and O’Connor include a section on noun patterns, as do the classic reference grammars of Hebrew.2 In addition to this, several places throughout the grammar point to a historical reconstruction of the Hebrew language, but there is no place where these are presented systematically or where the authors state the rules of this reconstruction to the student.

Some of the terminology used is a bit confusing. The authors use the term “other words” because “the term ‘particle’ is ambiguous” (322). They include the following categories in “other words”: prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, predictors of existence, interrogatives, discourse markers, interjections, and oaths. This term, however, is even less descriptive and more ambiguous than the traditional categories used by other reference grammars. In addition, the authors use the term “left dislocation” to refer to clauses or nouns that are placed at the beginning of the sentence or clause and then referred to with a pronoun in the main body of the sentence or clause. As Hebrew is written right to left, these terms are not left dislocated, they are actually right dislocated. This term is neither illuminating nor descriptive of the grammatical feature it labels. However, the distinction that the authors make between “fronting” and “left dislocation” is an important and helpful distinction, despite the terminology.3

One final problem with this grammar is the citation of statistics for how many times a preposition, particle, or conjunction occurs in the Hebrew Bible. The citation of the number itself is meaningless without context. When dealing with the waw, for example, they provide the statistics of the waw in relation to the total number of words in the Hebrew Bible, which is slightly more helpful, but this is the only example in the book of the relative value. On the other end of the spectrum, the authors only cite the occurrences of the prepositions את and עמ in the Pentateuch, which skews these raw numbers, rendering them with little importance.4

1 Hans Bauer and Pontus Leander, Grammatik des biblisch-Aramäischen (Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1927); Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. Emil Kautzsch, trans. Arthur Ernest Cowley, 2 nd English ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1910).

2 Bruce K. Waltke and Michael O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990).

3 The term fronting describes the placing of an element at the beginning of the sentence to focus on its importance. The authors give the following example: “Me (and no-one else) has the Lord sent to anoint you as king” (1 Sam 15:1) [Me as the direct object]. For left dislocation they give this example “Everything I am commanding you today, that you must take care to do” (Deut. 13:1). Fronting is moving constituent parts to the front of the sentence, while left dis-location is a clause constituent that is placed outside the clause, and then referred to with a pronoun or reference. See pages 492 and 493.

4 It is also problematic that these two prepositions are only illustrated with examples found in the Pentateuch. A reference grammar of this scope should cover the full range of the corpus involved.