This book is intended to introduce basic and critical issues of Hebrew syntax to beginning and intermediate students. It grows out of eighteen collective years of experience in teaching Biblical Hebrew to seminarians. Each year, we teach or supervise the instruction for approximately 180 students in preparation for ordained ministry or other religious professions. Our experiences led us to conclude that a significant gap exists between, on the one hand, the current scholarly understanding of Hebrew syntax, based on significant progress in the discipline in recent decades, and on the other hand, the understanding of Hebrew syntax among our students. The problem seemed compounded by the lack of an intermediate-level grammar, holding a position between beginning grammars and advanced reference grammars. In addition, the ever-growing demands on theological education today have resulted in less time to master Biblical Hebrew. Often the first thing omitted in a beginning Hebrew course is an overview of syntactical features. Our purpose, then, has been simply to bridge the gap, as best we can, between our students and the best of current research on Biblical Hebrew syntax.

This book, then, is not intended to replace the standard reference grammars, which we have consulted constantly in the process, but to present to beginning and intermediate students a means of entry into the latest scholarship on Biblical Hebrew. To this end, we have included extensive references in the footnotes where appropriate.