Jacob Weingreen (1907–1995)

I've been using this grammar since last year, working through a few pages at a time and doing the exercises during down time.

This text, though an old standard for generations of Hebrew students and now somewhat dated, maintains its reputation based on the quality of the exercises. There are many newer Hebrew grammars to choose from, but Weingreen is still the best beginning grammar of the lot if you must learn Hebrew thoroughly. A great feature of these exercises is that they are taken for the most part directly and organically from the OT text. Furthermore, Weingreen works you on the strong verb paradigm before doing weak verbs, and only then discusses underlying rules of phonology illustrated in every category of the weak verb. This is often lacking in some of the modern grammars.

Overall, this is a classic Hebrew grammar that excels at building your intuition of word order and idiom, especially if you take the exercises, translate them into English, and then translate them back into Hebrew. Also a superb reference grammar. I held back a star only because Weingreen's explanation of the verbal system is outdated (you can see this reflected in the fact that seminaries that still recognise the merit of this text also assign a grammatical supplement with updated explanations of the verbal system).… (mehr)