Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008. Pp. xvi + 629. Paper. $29.95. ISBN 1932792708. Paul L. Chen Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Houston, Texas Bandstra’s Genesis 1–11: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text is the second volume of the Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Text series. This volume is basically divided into three parts. The first part covers the preface and the abbreviations (xi–xvi); the second part, the introduction and the “handbook” of Gen 1–11 per se (1–612), and, finally, the glossary, bibliography, and index (613–29). While the preface provides the author’s academic background and explains the lengthy journey to his approach, it is in the introduction and the glossary that one finds the key to understand this new text-linguistic methodology. The introduction is a type of “crash” course where the author introduces the innovative concepts, the new categories, and the techniques of the so-called functional grammar. The glossary is helpful in that it explains all the new descriptive terms. In fact, without a careful reading of the introduction, this handbook would be unintelligible and even hard to use. Bandstra endorses this fact in his preface, where he calls the attention of the reader to note that, only by working “through the Introduction and refer[ring] to the Glossary throughout, will any of this make sense at all” (xii). Bandstra starts his introduction by pinpointing the deficiency of introductory courses in classical Hebrew grammar. He argues that these courses basically focus on the grammatical forms and vocabulary and do not provide adequate tools to go beyond the clause level. [Full Review]

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