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 focuses on 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 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 examines that in all stems, forms with vocalic suffixes are identical to their strong counterparts. In all stems, qaals with consonantal suffixes beginning with do not take weak dagesh following quiescent. Some roots have more than one weak consonant, in which case they exhibit the characteristics of both weak root classes. This means that doubly weak roots may look quite different from their strong counterparts, but they are generally formed predictably.
