The First Time I Saw a Hebrew Bible...

Whenever people learn that I teach (and love) biblical Hebrew, they usually want to know how I first became interested in the language, assuming that I have a really cool story. It is, quite simply, a love story. I became infatuated with the language the first time I saw a Hebrew Bible in graduate school in the early nineties. When I first laid eyes on that Hebrew font, I thought to myself, "That is beautiful, and I want to learn how to read it." That's how it all began. I always say that it's a really silly reason to enter a PhD program, but after my initial crush and all of the ups and downs of learning a foreign language--or four--as an adult, I am profoundly in love with the text. I believe that ancient texts continue to resonate with us today, because as my brilliant Hebrew teacher at SMU, Dr. Roy Heller, says, the Bible teaches us about ourselves, God, and what it means to be in relationship with God. I believe that ancient texts resonate with us today, because they teach us what it means to be human.

I am fond of saying to my students, "Everyone should learn biblical Hebrew!" and "A little Hebrew never hurt anyone." You may wonder, then,why learn biblical Hebrew (or Greek for that matter), when we have so many good translations? I agree that we do have many good and trustworthy translations of the Bible, but here are some of the reasons why I love reading the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew:

• The Bible is such a familiar text, in fact, so familiar that it can be difficult to read the words on the page without already thinking we know what the text means. There is a rabbinic saying, "Turn it over and turn it over again for everything is in it." (I also say this about Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar.) The Bible is an expansive text and just as we change over time, what we see in the text changes over time too. What I notice in a text today will be different than what I noticed last year or five years ago. Reading the Hebrew Bible in its original language opens an entire world of meaning within the text.

•  About those good, trustworthy translations...Varying our language is a tenet of what is considered good writing. I practiced this earlier when I first stated that I was infatuated with the text and later called it a "crush" which was also supposed to be a bit funny. After all, who talks about having a crush on the Bible? Repetition is an important feature of biblical Hebrew that can reveal the internal emphasis in a story. When translators practice "good writing" by varying their language, the beauty and importance of this repetition is lost. 

• Reading the text in Hebrew slows me down--and that's a really good thing. Words or stories I would have quickly passed over in English can leave me awestruck in Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew has very stable "syntax," which is just a really fancy word for sentence structure: verb--subject--object. A break in this syntax signals a change in the story, emphasis, or an important point. For example in Deuteronomy 16:20, the verse begins with a noun twice repeated which is highly unusual in Hebrew: "Righteousness, righteousness you shall pursue." (This is typically translated "justice," but that's the subject of another post.) And, since a little Hebrew never hurt anyone: 

    צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף

Beautiful, right?

Lesson # 1: Biblical Hebrew is beauti--no, wait. Biblical Hebrew is written from right to left, hence the right margin alignment. 

Another great example appears in the Jacob cycle (Anyone who knows me well also knows that I love the character of Jacob.) I read Hebrew every Wednesday with a good friend of mine, Dr. Mary Jo Kaska, and we are translating the Jacob cycle. We started with Rebekah's pregnancy (Secret meeting with God. I'm just saying...), and in Genesis 26:19-32, we find what looks like an uneventful few verses. Isaac and the Philistines are fighting over the wells Abraham, Isaac's father, had dug. Had I read this part of the story in English, I would have passed over it quite quickly, but in Hebrew, it is an enormously fun and telling text (again, another post for later time.)

Hebrew as a language is constructed quite differently than English. The two thousand year old culture of the Bible is a very different culture than that of the United States. This was a corporate (as in group), honor and shame culture, not the individualized meritocracy on which the U.S. is predicated today.

For anyone who is interested in taking this journey with me, I will post about biblical Hebrew, Bible study, biblical exegesis, and the multitude of fascinating things I and my friend find in the text. I also love to recommending resources to study biblical Hebrew and the Bible in general no matter your level of expertise. I find that people enjoy learning about the biblical text and world and that many people, in fact, hunger for it.

Up next...What Ray Donovan teaches us about biblical Hebrew...

Has anyone fallen in love yet?


Until next time,
Cheryl