Scientific Hebrew studies and Hebrew as an academic subject have increasingly diverged in recent years. Nowhere else in theology is the often-cited unity of research and teaching as poorly realized as here: not only students but also professors of the Old Testament, who learned Hebrew in a traditional manner through a preparatory language course, often find themselves perplexed by the linguistically and philologically oriented branch of Old Testament studies with its complex questions. The present book is a textbook, but not one that simply rearranges the facts presented in many other textbooks. Rather, it is a scholarly introduction. This means that readers are not only offered ready-made solutions to problems.