Zondervan has been busy putting out several new biblical language resources lately. They were kind enough to send me some to check out and I’m happy to share them here.
Larry Mitchel’s A Student’s Vocabulary for Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic has been updated from the original edition. The primary revisions are stylistic, bringing it more in line with the SBL Handbook 2nd ed. The bibliography up front was also updated and expanded. The book lists Hebrew vocab down to 10x occurrences, and all Aramaic vocab.
Lee Fields has produced a video series to teach through his Hebrew for the Rest of Us workbook, published in 2008. While the workbook is pretty inexpensive (around $18), the dvd series is around $70 right now on Amazon. This set would make a good resource for pastors wanting to teach a basic course on Hebrew to teach their congregation (the brave ones who would participate) or to teach in college with only one or two semester of Hebrew required.
Dan Wallace has also produced a DVD series teaching his Greek Grammar: Beyond the Basics. Since Wallace’s textbook is used so widely in the West, these videos are quite welcome for all who want to teach themselves Greek, refresh their Greek, or perhaps even for use in the classroom (I suppose, with permission from Zondervan). Unfortunately, this series is about $100.
Finally, check out Daniel Block’s Ruth volume in the Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament: A Discourse Analysis of the Hebrew Bible. The commentary is full of images and figures, including diagrams that show the connections between lines within paragraphs. The commentary isn’t exactly a discourse analysis as the subtitle of the series suggests–it rather uses some elements of discourse analysis when analyzing each paragraph. Nevertheless, it’s a welcome addition to Hebrew commentaries and I look forward to more volumes to come.
