Pronunciation for Seow’s A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew

According to those who create models of language acquisition, there are several skills involved in using language. We can categorize them as active and passive skills. Oral language is active in speaking and passive in listening. Written language is active in writing and passive in reading. Seow’s grammar does what it can to develop reading (passive written) skills, but it does absolutely nothing for writing (active written), speaking (active oral) or listening (passive oral) skills.

Seow’s A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew is strong in terms of how it covers grammar. He explores the morphology of theoretical forms of nouns, verbs, etc. He presents everything in full paradigm tables, compares the differences between the various binyan forms, and much more. Yet, while he is good at presenting transliterated forms, these transliterations do not go very far in helping someone learn to pronounce the words correctly. Indeed, there are problems with how he presents vocabulary, too.

For example, instead of saying in Lesson XVI that the word meaning to save, help is הוֹשִׁיעַ hôší(a)ʿ, he presents it as יָשַׁע and simply says that takes the hiphil binyan. In my presentation of the vocabulary, I will present the vocabulary forms as they are in the Bible rather than as Seow presents them – as related to the roots.

שלם in hiphil is הִשְׁלִים
ברך in hitpael is הִתְבָּרֵךְ
On these pages, verbs will be listed in the way that the words are really found, not by root.

The purpose of this page is to provide a spoken example of how the vocabulary should sound in each lesson of this grammar book. I will present the absolute (non-construct) forms of nouns in singular and plural (and dual, if relevant). Try to approximate the pronunciation and get used to reading words out loud in Hebrew.

In the files associated with this page, you will find lists of vocabulary words pulled from Seowʼs textbook. The big Hebrew word on the left has been tagged with an audio file that includes how the word is pronounced (spoken twice) and any other word in Hebrew that follows the end of the entry. All you have to do in order to hear the word is click or touch the word on the left. That should activate the audio file.

Iʼve tested this page on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 and on my Android phoneʼs browser. It worked on all of these systems. If you experience any problems with the page, let me know on the forum.