72

Response
John F. A. Sawyer Dept. of Religious Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1

7RU, England.
now

in the fortunate position, not helpful criticisms and suggestions, like those of Hospers and Muraoka, but also of having been enabled by his publisher to incorporate most of them immediately in a second impression. This is now available at the same price At the and in a very much stronger stitched binding. same time the editors of JSOT decided to publish Dr. Muraokas list of detailed comments as a separate leaflet which readers can insert into copies of the I first impression of the grammar if they so desire. should like to express my gratitude to him for all his help during the last eighteen months, and also to Routledge and Kegan Paul and the editors of JSOT for On the whole I have gladly their interest and support. the of suggestions accepted correspondents and reviewers, and I believe that, as a result, the second impression is much improved. Virtually all matters of detail such as errors, in typing or pointing, minor &dquo;to come out&dquo; as well as &dquo;to go omissions (e.g. Nh> out&dquo;), additions to the bibliography, and other I have also added improvements have been dealt with. an &dquo;Index of Biblical Passages Discussed&dquo;, as one further indication that the primary aim of the book is to enable people to analyse and understand the text of the Hebrew Bible. The author is

only of having received

many

Several reviewers have commented that in

some

respects the grammar is oversimplified: e.g. not enough space is given to the &dquo;Ain Ain verbs&dquo; or the &dquo;secondary stems&dquo; of the verb (Muraoka); th e Hebrew adjective as a grammatical category might have been more thoroughly

explained (Hospers); &dquo;very many forms have to be taken trust, without due explanation or correlation&dquo; (J. H. Eaton, Expository Times 87,11 (1976) p.350). Clearly the object is to achieve some kind of balance between an elementary textbook which is oversimplified
on

13
the point of gross inaccuracy, and a complete work of reference containing an analysis of every detail oi Biblical Hebrew ortlvography, phonology, grammar, There are several well known syntax and semantics. examples of the former, although, so far as I am In some cases, notably in aware, none of the latter. aspects of a somewhat reactionary phonology (Appendix A), and in my decision to omit separate analysis of the factitive function of the Doubled Stem (and thugs to ignore the excellent work of E. Jenni, Das 1-iebriiisel-ie Pi fel, which I reviewed in JSS 14,2 (ig6g), pp.260-2y, I erred on the side of oversimplification, and would have altered these had a more radical revision of the But I wish grammar been practicable at this stage. to defend most of my decisions on the following grounds.
to

( 1)

Diachronic explanations of forms like y~l~, ?p?F1 are not given in the main part of the and ~55n_ in an Appendix), because students of Hebrew begin with the citation-forms )11), and 1!.~ just as students of English M~ begins with &dquo;bring&dquo; and &dquo;think&dquo; before they come to &dquo;brought,&dquo; and thought&dquo;, not the other way In my experience, then, the question of round. why 1?tJ becomes -5~n before some of the suffix Furtherpronouns may or may not arise in class. more the answer may or may not prove helpful, since it often merely raises the further question of why in Hebrew (but not in Arabic), malk- became 1?tJ which virtually brings us back to a synchronic question about Hebrew.

grammar (but

(2)

The simpli fied transliteration system, which does not dist.ingiiisli, for example, between short vowels and composite shwas or between Aleph and Ayin, and represents words beginning with Aleph or Ayin as tliough they begin with a vowel (e.g. avral~am; N&dquo;1TY ezr5), seems to me to have enormous advantages 108r both the IPA system and the conventional system adopted by modern OT scholarship. The former is phonologically more accurate,

U9QfIN

74

orthographically more informative, but is used only in conjunctransliteration provided tion with the Hebrew script, as in my grammar, then there is no need to give so much information Of course, students using the grammar (as twice. well as students of the OT in English, incidentally) must also learn how the conventional system works as they will encounter it in OT studies and commentaries.
the latter

(3)

another area in which a balance &dquo;Genitive&dquo; may give the is hard to maintain. that there are inflected casewrong impression Abbreviations such as forms in Hebrew (Muraoka). D-stem and R-stem have become perhaps less transparent than was intended (according to one correspondent students have been known to be searching for a D in D-stem forms, especially as But on the whole I believe is the model!). ,~~ the choice of simple, transparent terms in preference to traditional terminology is helpful. Again there is no reason why other terms should not be used by teachers while still using A Modern

Terminology is

Introduction. Emphasis is on the analysis of actual Hebrew texts, and on the concepts and structures themselves rather than on the terms by No doubt these will vary which they are known. from one centre to another for many years to come.
&dquo;the drastic pedagogical readers to translate a single sentence or phrase from English into Hebrew be justified (Muraoka)? In the first place, it is obvious that the only purpose for which a beginner needs to know all the rules governing the spelling of the definite -1or the modes of attaching the suffix prefix That is pronouns to verbs, is to translate into Hebrew. with a traditional grammars why begin chapter (or several chapters) on the article, and why my own is free to begin with the &dquo;Verbless Sentence&dquo;, a feature almost universally acknowledged by reviewers and correspondents as a step

Finally, how innovation&dquo;of not

can

requiring

75
There is no reason, of course, why students forward. should not be required to copy out the Hebrew of the exercises to familiarize themselves with the script and spelling, just as it is desirable to have them reading it aloud. Equally there is no reason why they should not retranslate the existing exercises from English It has always seemed to me, however, back into Hebrew. that translation into Biblical Hebrew is qiiestionable Either the translator from a theoretical point of view. is consciously (i.e. from memory) reproducing the Biblical text (or accidentally hitting upon it), or else he is generating a piece of artificial lfebrew which may be, although no-one will ever know, unidiomatic or even Blatant errors like the notorious ungrammatical. series of thirty verbless clauses of the type 51t7 ~~1Q &dquo;the word is good&dquo; in one Hebrew grammar, can no doubt be avoided, and probably very simple phrases and sentences can be correctly translated into artificial But this does not alter the fact that, with Hebrew. such a small and unrepresentative corpus to work with, our knowledge of the subtleties of Biblical Hebrew grammar and semantics is not sufficient to guarantee that our students are not in fact writing unacceptable Biblical Hebrew, if they do not reproduce actual It is arguable that a student who can analyse examples. and reproduce correctly the 300 or so paradigmatic sentences contained in the examples and exercises of my grammar, but who might have difficulty in coping with some of the English to Hebrew translation exercises in more conventional grammars, would nonetheless have &dquo;an active grasp of the language&dquo;. Perhaps he would have acquired it, moreover, without &dquo;the cries of pain which go up from hundreds of students yearly&dquo; (J. Barr, Trans. Phil. Soc. , 1968, p. 52) .

[Dr. Sawyer
th0 r0vi0w

by

has not had the opportunity to David W. Bakpr.j

respond to