Sunday, June 8, 2008

Teach Yourself Biblical Aramaic

Eric Reymond, Lecturer of Northwest Semitic Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, has a website designed to introduce Biblical Aramaic to students with little exposure to Hebrew and other Semitic languages. It looks like a very useful tool.

2 comments:

Raven said...

What's the best resource for teaching yourself beginning Biblical Hebrew?

maklelan said...

There are a number of good Biblical Hebrew textbooks that can get you a long way, but none of them will be able to answer all your questions or explain grammar to you just the way you need it explained. Having someone available with knowledge of Biblical Hebrew is very important.

One of the standards is Lambdin's Introduction to Biblical Hebrew. It's kind of old, but it holds up. A more recent grammar is Gary Pratico's Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar. Another is Russell Fuller's Invitation to Biblical Hebrew.

John Cook has a preliminary manuscript of his Hebrew grammar available online at this address:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/holmstedt/Textbook.html

You can also find several online tutorials if you Google "learn biblical hebrew online" or something like that.

Once you get into parsing, a good resource for testing yourself is the following website:

http://ulrikp.dk/bp/

You'll also want a copy of the Hebrew Bible (BHS is the standard), a good lexicon (Brown, Driver, and Briggs is cheap but old), and, after a while, a good reference grammar.