Mounce’s Morphology type book in Hebrew

[Kristin]

Mounce’s Morphology gives comprehensive charts on verbs. Is there an equivalent book for Hebrew?

 

Thanks

[Abram K-J]

Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew: An Introduction by Joshua Blau is probably the best bet. It's not in Accordance but another couple titles from its series are, so we can hope! I was watching this title on various third-party print book Websites for quite some time before it finally dropped a little in price for me to purchase it. It's more academic than Mounce's Morphology, but it's about as good a Hebrew book as I know of.

[Brian W. Davidson]

Van Pelt’s compact guide might be a great option. Not exactly equivalent to Mounce, but less technical and more chart-like than Blau.

Edited October 12, 2022 by Brian W. Davidson

[Kristin]

Hi @Brian W. Davidson,

Thanks for the idea, but I think that anything that has the word "compact" in the title is not going to work. Actually, the more insanely technical the better, as I am actually looking for all instances of the Hebrew "to be" verb as comprehensive as grammatically possible. By that I mean I am looking for verbal forms which do not even occur in the Hebrew Bible, but would theoretically occur. It is obnoxious how often I hear books saying "a form of the to be verb" but can't find ANY resource to actually list all these hypothetical forms.

 

Since Hebrew really doesn't use the "to be" verb like English does, even Hebrew grammars seem to skip over the "to be" verb and just tell you a few random forms of it that you need to know. While the most famous example is the name of God, there are other hypothetical forms of "to be" that I have been looking for. That is one thing I appreciate about Mounce's book, that he lists verbal forms which do not even occur in Koine, but would be hypothetical forms.

 

Kristin

[Michel Gilbert]

Kristin, you might find what you’re looking for on page 337 of Martin Krause’s Hebräisch

Biblisch-Hebräische Unterrichtsgrammatik (de Gruyter, 2008). I assume they have the same table (היה sein) in the new two-volume edition, see https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110697377/html . I only have the 2008 edition.

 

(As an aside) regarding a Mounce equivalent, I would supplement Blau with A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar, 2nd ed., by van der Merwe, Naudé, and Kroeze. Blau doesn’t have a word index, Merwe et al. does. I couldn’t find היה in the topic index in Blau. And the reference grammar looks and feels more like Mounce.

 

If you do take a look at Krause, you might like his other charts (pp. 318-345 in my edition). Some of them are even color-coded.

 

Michel