"In the Beginning" is chock full of fascinating information about Hebrew and its history. The book grabs your attention from the first page and covers the invention of the alphabet, ancient Hebrew, the Hebrew of the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest copy of the Hebrew Bible (only 1,000 years old!), Modern Hebrew, and everything in between, all in manner that's readable and scholarly at the same time.
Hoffman's style is fun and engaging. One reviewer wrote that the book "reads like an adventure novel," and I couldn't agree more.

This book will not teach you Hebrew (and you don't have to know any Hebrew to understand it), but it is quickly becoming the de facto standard book *about* Hebrew.

I highly recommend "In the Beginning" for anyone interested in ancient languages, history, Hebrew, or the Bible.

Mr. Hoffman fills many pages telling us what we don't know or don't know for sure about biblical Hebrew, but devotes almost no space to telling the reader in clear, concise language what we do know. There is no simple table telling the reader what the pronunciations were or probably were for each letter at each stage of Hebrew's development. There is no table or list showing how the same thought might have been expressed in early biblical Hebrew, late biblical Hebrew, rabbinic Hebrew and modern Hebrew. The reader must puzzle it all out for himself - and, of course, cannot. And there are some probable errors, such as the idea that the sound of the undageshed tav in biblical Hebrew could realistically have been /s/. The book is also marred by a large number of typographical errors, many of which should have been caught by a simple spell-check program, and the rest by simple proof-reading.