Ruth: A Guide to Reading Biblical Hebrew
A Brief Review
Biblical language reading guides have been flying off the press over the past half-decade or so. With the Baylor Handbook Series, the New International Greek Testament Commentary, and the Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament, there have been plenty to choose from—that is, from the New Testament. As you can tell, a few of the options above solely focus on the GNT, and the one ones which include the Hebrew Bible only have a few of the usual suspects. Recently, Lexham Press has begun a series of its own
What caused it first and foremost to stand out to me is that they started with the Hebrew Bible! While, as with most series, they started with shorter books like Ruth, I am sure that they will expand the series further. I really hope they do.
The first thing that stood out to me about this volume was its usability. On the back cover of the book, Lexham makes this clear as they say that this volume is for “intermediate readers of Hebrew” as well as those who may have gotten a bit rusty with their Hebrew over the years. What is clear is that this volume is for all. When it comes to curricula, usability is half of the pie. If you have great information, but the format is difficult on the reader, then they likely will not get as much out of it. Lexham’s series really goes above and beyond in this way.
What I find most helpful about this volume is that they splice out the text in many helpful ways, without destroying the flow of the text itself. The first division is a larger block of text which consists of usually about five verses. This allows the reader to get a sense for the larger macrostructure of the passage. Once the audience reads through the larger block, the text is then broken down by verse, and then by accent marks, as you can see from the picture below:
To me, this is what separates Lexham’s series and the Baylor Handbook series mentioned above. I really appreciate the Baylor series. I think it is in some ways better in terms of the volume of information which is included in each book and the technicality. But I think they sacrifice usability on the altar of technicality, as the reader can get lost at times. The Lexham series does not lack on the technicality, but I think it finds ways of being more concise when it can, and it really works in their favor.
In conclusion, Lexham’s A Guide to Reading Biblical Hebrew series is off to a great start. I think it has a promising future and will be a helpful resource for beginner and intermediate students alike. In a lot of ways, it is a reader and a grammar in one, which I think is very desirable with the future of biblical language resources.