Basics of Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary Audio

By: Miles V. Van Pelt

Narrated by: Miles V. Van Pelt, Nancy Erickson

Basics of Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary Audio is a convenient and useful audio companion for students wanting to learn and reinforce Biblical Hebrew vocabulary. This audio product includes every term that occurs fifty times or more in the Hebrew Bible. Vocabulary is read in order of frequency and students may select from Classical Hebrew pronunciation (by Miles V. Van Pelt) or Modern Hebrew pronunciation (by Nancy L. Erickson).

Terrible accent

I like the choice and sequence of the vocab but the pronunciation is horrible. Hopefully this can be done with a Hebrew speaker.

Well Done Book - WRONG Modern Pronunciation

I have really enjoyed Dr. Van Pelt's Hebrew Textbook and materials and am excited about the new edition. While this audiobook was well done, I have two significant complaints.

1) THE MODERN HEBREW PRONUNCIATION IS WRONG - I don't know where they get their pronunciations or how they define "modern" but if you go online and listen to modern Israeli's pronounce their words it can be very different. This is an "Americanized/Anglicized" modern pronunciation that would sound wrong to a native speaker (sometimes significantly). For example, the pronunciation of "Resh" is very different than the English "R". I decided to learn the modern Hebrew pronunciation in my studies so as to be partially understandable to a modern speaker and was sad to have to rely on other materials after purchasing this to get the proper pronunciation. I just feel like there is no excuse for this. They should have used a native speaker.

2) NO REPETITION ABILITY - This is more a format complaint than a quality complaint. While the organization and chapters of the book is solid and you can easily see chapter titles and sections, you cannot really set an audiobook for repeat if you want to listen to a chapter over and over for memorization. Because of this, it should be offered on an mp3/CD format as well and not just audiobook. (I checked and as of this writing it is not available).

So, in summary, the audiobook quality is great, it has good organization/chapter breakdowns, and the traditional pronunciation has no issues, but I don't understand how they could get the modern pronunciation so wrong.