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

Hebrew Language Resources

by Shawn Virgil Goodwin

Abstract Publications on the Hebrew language are extensive.1 This essay provides an overview of significant touchstones in the study of Hebrew. Special attention is paid to comparative Semitic linguistics—specifically, the languages most closely related to Hebrew. Surveying Hebrew resources provides a valuable aid to the reference librarian who is helping patrons find quality resources in the study of Hebrew, as well as the acquisitions librarian who needs to select content in the Semitic language section of his or her collection. This guide provides a solid base collec-tion for any library serving students engaged in the academic study of Biblical/Classical Hebrew. These sources are important references for students as they reach advanced levels of study.

From a linguistic standpoint, one of the biggest problems in studying biblical Hebrew is the small size of the corpus. For the intermediate and advanced student of Hebrew to overcome this challenge, she must start looking at the comparative grammar of the other Semitic languages. The purpose of this essay is to provide the bibliographic context for the study of Hebrew grammar with special regard for its closest linguistic rela-tives. In order to accomplish this goal, I first outline works important for the larger question of Hebrew’s place in the Semitic language family. Next, I deal with the languages most closely related to Biblical Hebrew.2 In this section, special attention is paid to strong introductory grammars, reference works, and lexical tools. In the next section, I turn to Hebrew itself. In that section, tools for Hebrew are broken down into reference grammars, morphology, verbal semantics, dictionaries, concordances, and software tools. The last section contains some works that introduce the student to later stages of Hebrew. It is the hope that this essay will help librarians and students of Hebrew find the right sources to use the language effectively.

Comparative Semitics and Hebrew

Neither linguistics nor comparative Semitics have systematically been applied to the study of Biblical Hebrew in a single reference work. The best grammar working with Hebrew in its comparative Semitic setting is Bauer and Leander’s Historische Grammatik der hebräischen Sprache.3 The translation from Hebrew of Blau’s Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew, unfortunately, was not revised as thoroughly as it should have been. The book is disorganized, and the bibliography has been inconsistently updated, leaving the work on a whole unreliable and dated.4 Na’ama Pat-El and David Steinberg have written helpful reviews of this work that extend its value. Pat-El emphasizes some important recent work that has not been incorporated, while Steinberg provides a

1 I would like to thank Andrew Burlingame, Aaron Christianson, and Nathan S. French for reading drafts of this work, suggesting resources, and correcting errors.

2 The important languages of Akkadian, Arabic, and Ge’ez are not treated here, but more thorough bibliographies for these languages are found in the works of Stefan Weninger, et al., ed., The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook, Handbücher Zur Sprach- Und Kommunikationswissenschaft 36 (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011); Roger D. Woodard, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2004); Robert Hetzron, ed., The Semitic Languages, Routledge Language Family Descriptions (New York: Routledge, 1998); as well as the comparative Semitic section below.

3 Hans Bauer, Historische Grammatik Der Hebräischen Sprache Des Alten Testamentes (Hildesheim : G. Olms, 1962).

4 Joshua Blau, Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew: An Introduction (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010).