An Introductory Grammar of Rabbinic Hebrew

In Greek and Roman Palestine we find a Hebrew dialect that had existed alongside the literary language of Biblical Hebrew but had followed its own pattern of development. After the destruction of the Temple, the rabbis elevated this dialect to the status of a literary language, ’Rabbinic Hebrew’, and employed it in the composition of the Mishnah, Tosefta, and halakhic midrashim.
This volume is a practical grammar of Rabbinic Hebrew that brings M.H. Segal’s 1927 grammar up to date by incorporating the results of recent investigations in this field. It also adds a clearly pedagogic perspective, with vocabulary and exercises in every unit, and introduces readers to the thinking of the Sages of Israel (each unit commences with a text that bears on a theological, historical, literary, or methodological topic).

Miguel Pérez Fernández, Ph.D. (1975) in Semitic Philology, Madrid, is Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature in the University of Granada. He is series editor of Biblioteca Midrásica, in which series he has published translations, with commentaries, of Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer (Valencia, 1984), Sifre to Numbers (Valencia, 1989) and Sifra (Estella, 1997).
John F. Elwolde Ph.D. (1988) in Linguistics, Hull, is an Associate Member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. His publications in the fields of Hebrew language and the Dead Sea Scrolls include translations of A. Sáenz-Badillos’s A history of the Hebrew Language (Cambridge, 1993) and M. Pérez Fernández’s An Introductory Grammar of Rabbinic Hebrew (Leiden, 1997).