Rey TO THE EXERCISES IN, tHE LATE Proressor A. B. DAVIDSON’S revisep NTRODUCTORY HEBREW GRAMMAR ‘ | WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY JOHN EDGAR McFADYEN B,A,\(Oxon.), M.A,, D.D. PROFESSOR OF OLD TESTAMENT LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THEOLOGY UNITED FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW AUTHOR OF “THE USE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT” ‘CTH INTEREST OF THE BIBLE” ETC. _Epinsurcu: T. & T. CLARK, 38 Grorce Street . 1924PRINTED IN GREAT DNITARE IY 7. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, MAMILTON, KENT, AND CO, LIMITED NEW YORK? CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS ai PREFACE, Opinions differ widely with regard to the wisdom and expediency of publishing a Key. Students have their own reasons for welcoming such things, but the first instinct of teachers may well be to protest. They may be honestly afraid that their students will too readily succumb to the temptation to resort to this perilous aid, before they have exercised their own minds to the proper degree upon the often irksome task of translation, It was probably for this reason that the late Professor A. B. Davidson steadily resisted repeated requests to publish a Key to his popular Hebrew Grammar. There is much, however, to be said on the other side. The interests of students in Universities and Theological Colleges are not the only interests to be considered, It is within my knowledge that there are men working in loneliness in many parts of the land—some painfully en- deavouring to recapture whatever Hebrew they once knew, others facing the language for the first time with no teacher and no means of readily ascertaining whether the transla- tions which they have so laboriously excogitated are accurate or faulty. To such men a Key, especially if it discussed and explained the difficulties encountered could hardly fail to be a boon.vi PREFACE. But even College students may profit from the con- scientious use of such a help. A friend to whom I showed the manuscript asked, “ But how will you keep it from your students?” I replied that, so far from desiring to keep it from them, it would be my hope that they would diligently use it. One may be permitted to believe that a person who is old enough to learn Hebrew may be trusted to bring to his task some measure of conscience and of self- respect. It is obvious that he must begin by doing his own work as doggedly and honestly as if the Key were not in existence. He must make his own experiments and mistakes, for it is chiefly in this way that he learns where the difficulties lie, and what to look out for in grammatical form, syntax and idiom when he reads the literature itself. Then, having done his best, let him turn to the Key and carefully compare with it his own translation, resolutely declining to pass on until he clearly understands the differences, if there be any. A bare translation, however, unaccompanied by ex- planations, would leave the student at many points unsatisfied. I have therefore appended to each Exercise a series of Notes that deal with the difficulties, explaining how the forms are arrived at, emphasizing—sometimes with deliberate reiteration—the principles on which they rest, and showing what is erroneous in forms which may appear plausible. With the Notes I have also interwoven copious illustrations, drawn from the Old Testament itself, of the various grammatical and syntactical phenomena as they emerge; so that any one who resolutely works his way through these and faithfully consults all the references to PREFACE. vii the Grammar should, if he takes the trouble to extend his vocabulary, be at the end in a position not only to write tolerable Hebrew prose, but—what is of more importance —to read with comparative ease, and with a real apprecia- tion of the subtler shades of meaning, practically all the prose and much of the poetry of the Old Testament. The serious student should, however, in addition possess and work through Davidson’s Hebrew Syntax (T. & T. Clark), which is an invaluable presentation of the main syntactical facts; and as his curiosity in connexion with the verb advances, he ought to supplement this with Driver’s Hebrew Tenses (Clarendon Press, Oxford). The most satisfactory and illuminating discipline of all is to work thoroughly through some book of the Old Testament whose grammatical and syntactical usages have been care- fully discussed by a competent Semitic scholar, Among such books may be warmly recommended Driver’s Wotes on the Hebrew Text of the Books of Samuel (Clarendon Press, Oxford), C. F. Burney’s Notes on the Hebrew Text of the Books of Kings (Clarendon Press, Oxford), Spurrell’s Votes on the Hebrew Text of the Book of Genesis (Clarendon Press, Oxford), and T, H. Robinson’s The Book of Amos, Hebrew Text (S.P.C.K.). The beginner, especially if he has no tutor, would do well to go carefully through the Rev. Duncan Cameron’s First Hebrew Reader (T. & T. Clark), which is a very helpful inductive study of the Hebrew text of the Book of Jonah. For fuller explanations of ordinary forms than are to be found in the shorter Grammars, and for adequate discussion of the rarer forms, Cowley’s transla- tion of Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, as edited and enlarged