ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to Biblical Hebrew language and texts. It presents the essentials of biblical grammar and vocabulary in a systematic way. The chapter examines all the topics expected in a first-year Biblical Hebrew course, including the Hebrew writing system, pointing rules, nouns and adjectives, parsing, mastery of strong and weak verb paradigms and full attention to syntax. Hebrew is a fascinating language and a member of the Afro-Asiatic language family, which is a large group of languages spread throughout much of northern Africa and the Middle East. The chapter focuses on cohortative, which is used to convey first-person suggestions. The cohortative is very easy to construct: it consists of the first person yiqol forms with the suffix. The addition of the suffix causes pretonic reduction. There are only two variants, singular and plural; because Biblical Hebrew first person forms are always common in gender, there are no distinct masculine and feminine forms.
