Why Learn Any Hebrew?

Nehemiah came back to Jerusalem a second time some while after the thirty-second year of King Artaxerxes (Nehemiah 13:6), that is, some time after 433 BC. The walls he had rebuilt were standing. What he found inside them broke his heart in a different way. Men of Judah had married women from Ashdod, Ammon and Moab, and in their houses a generation was growing up that could not follow the covenant when it was read. 'Half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod or of the other peoples, but could not speak the language of Judah' (Nehemiah 13:24). In the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), an electronic edition of the manuscript on which the standard printed Hebrew Bible is based, the key words are מְדַבֵּר אַשְׁדּוֹדִית (medabber ashdodit, speaking Ashdodite) and לְדַבֵּר יְהוּדִית (ledabber yehudit, to speak Judean). The verse ends with a phrase that sounds like a shrug: וְכִלְשׁוֹן עַם וָעָם (vekhilshon am va'am, and according to the language of this people or that).

Look at what is being lost. Nehemiah 8 described the great day when Ezra read the Law from daybreak until noon to everyone who could understand, and the Levites explained it 'so that the people could understand what was being read' (Nehemiah 8:8). Every child in Nehemiah 13:24 who could speak only Ashdodite would have stood in that square and understood nothing. The covenant of the LORD with Israel was written in the language of Judah. A family that let that language go was letting go of its access to the word of God within a single generation.

Nehemiah's response was violent, and the narrative reports it without comment: he rebuked, cursed, beat and pulled hair (13:25). Interpreters weigh his actions differently. Some read him as a zealous reformer whose methods belong to his time and office and are not offered as a model; others read Ezra and Nehemiah as books that let their heroes' failings show, ending as they do with a prayer that God would remember him (13:31). That debate belongs to a lesson on Ezra and Nehemiah, which you will find in the Old Testament Survey track under 'The Return'. What concerns this lesson is the thing Nehemiah saw clearly: when the language of scripture is lost, the scripture is lost with it, unless someone translates and explains.

That is still true in your church. Most Christians in the world will never read a line of Hebrew, and they do not need to. God has given his word in their languages, through translators who spent their lives learning Hebrew so that others would not have to. But every church needs some people who can go back to the language of Judah and check: who can see what the translators saw, explain why they chose what they chose, and keep the congregation from being misled by people who claim to know what the Hebrew says when they do not. This track aims to make you one of those people. It will not make you a Hebrew scholar. It will make you a careful reader who knows where to look.

A note on how this track writes Hebrew. Hebrew is printed from right to left, so when a Hebrew word appears in an English sentence your eye has to jump. Each Hebrew word or phrase is followed by a transliteration, the Hebrew written in English letters, and a gloss, a short English meaning, the first time it appears in a lesson. Hebrew quotations are short, and they come from the Westminster Leningrad Codex, a careful electronic copy of the oldest complete Hebrew Bible, which is free for anyone to use and which the free tools display. In the next three lessons you will learn to read the letters for yourself, and the transliterations will start to become unnecessary.

Hebrew is a Semitic language, one of a family of languages from the Near East that includes Aramaic, Phoenician, Akkadian, Arabic and the Ethiopian language Ge'ez. Its closest relatives are the languages of Israel's neighbours. Phoenician, spoken on the coast of what is now Lebanon, is so close to Hebrew that the two were written in practically the same alphabet. The Moabite Stone, also called the Mesha Stele, an inscription of King Mesha of Moab from about 840 BC found in 1868, is in a language close enough to Hebrew that a beginner in Hebrew can pick out words in it, and it names the God of Israel. Isaiah calls Hebrew 'the language of Canaan' (Isaiah 19:18), and from the point of view of a language family that is exactly what it is: the speech of the land Israel came to live in, which became the language in which God spoke to them.

The oldest Hebrew inscriptions are not written in the letters you will learn in this module. They use an older script, which scholars call paleo-Hebrew, close to the Phoenician alphabet. The Gezer Calendar, a small limestone tablet usually dated to the tenth century BC, lists the farming months in an early form of it. The Siloam Inscription, cut into the wall of the water tunnel that King Hezekiah dug about 700 BC (2 Kings 20:20) and found in 1880, uses it too. The square letters of every Hebrew Bible today came later. They grew out of the Aramaic script of the Persian empire, and Jewish scribes took them up after the exile; the Babylonian Talmud credits the change to Ezra. The old letters did not vanish at once. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, written in square letters, still write the divine name in the old script, as a mark of reverence.

Almost all of the Old Testament is Hebrew. A small part, about two hundred and seventy verses, is in Aramaic, the language of international business and government in the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires. The Aramaic portions are Daniel 2:4 to 7:28, Ezra 4:8 to 6:18 and 7:12-26, one verse in Jeremiah (Jeremiah 10:11), and two words in Genesis. In Genesis 31:47 Laban the Aramean names the heap of stones in his own language, יְגַר שָׂהֲדוּתָא (yegar sahaduta, heap of witness), and Jacob names the same heap in Hebrew, גַּלְעֵד (gal'ed, heap of witness). Two languages, one meaning, and two men who could not quite trust each other: the very first Aramaic in the Bible is a lesson in what translation is for.

Aramaic matters for a reason beyond these chapters. By the time of the New Testament it had become the everyday language of most Jews in Judea and Galilee. Hebrew was still the language of scripture and prayer, and the Dead Sea Scrolls show that Hebrew was still being written, and probably spoken in some circles, in the time of Jesus; scholars debate how widely. In the synagogues the scripture was read in Hebrew and then rendered aloud into Aramaic, a verse or a few verses at a time, by a translator. The Mishnah, the Jewish law code completed about AD 200, gives rules for how the reader and the translator are to take turns. Those Aramaic renderings, later written down, are called the Targums, and Module 8 will come back to them and to the Aramaic chapters.

One more fact about names will save you confusion. The Old Testament never calls its own language Hebrew. It calls it יְהוּדִית (yehudit, Judean), as in Nehemiah 13:24, 2 Kings 18:26 and Isaiah 36:11, or 'the language of Canaan'. The word Hebrew in the Old Testament is the name of a people: 'Abram the Hebrew' (Genesis 14:13), 'I am a Hebrew,' replied Jonah (Jonah 1:9). The earliest surviving use of Hebrew as the name of the language is in Greek, in the prologue that Ben Sira's grandson wrote, soon after 132 BC, to his translation of his grandfather's book, now usually called Sirach or Ecclesiasticus. The New Testament then uses it freely, as when John says that a pool 'in Hebrew is called Bethesda' (John 5:2). When the New Testament says Hebrew, it may sometimes mean Aramaic; the Koine Greek track discusses that in its first lesson.

The Old Testament was the only Bible Jesus had. When he went into the synagogue at Nazareth 'the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him' (Luke 4:17), a Hebrew scroll, and he unrolled it and read. After his resurrection he told his disciples that everything must be fulfilled 'that is written about Me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms' (Luke 24:44). That threefold description matches the shape of the Hebrew Bible as Jewish tradition arranges it: the Torah, or Law; the Nevi'im, or Prophets; and the Ketuvim, or Writings, of which the Psalms are the largest book, and the first in most printed Hebrew Bibles. The Jewish name for the Hebrew Bible, Tanakh, is made from the first letters of those three names.

Jesus also spoke about the letters of the Hebrew text. 'Not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished' (Matthew 5:18). The Greek word behind jot is ἰῶτα (iōta), the smallest Greek letter, and almost every commentator takes it to stand for the smallest Hebrew letter, the yod, which you will learn in the next lesson. The stroke of a pen is a tiny mark; many think Jesus meant the small projections that tell one Hebrew letter from another, which Lesson 2 will show you. Jesus did not say this to make the Law a puzzle of letters. He said it to make the point that every part of God's word stands. But it does show that he knew the Hebrew text closely enough to speak of its smallest letter.

And Jesus prayed the Hebrew scriptures at the moment of his death. 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' (Mark 15:34) is the first line of Psalm 22, which the BSB gives as 'My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?' (Psalm 22:1). The Hebrew psalm has אֵלִי אֵלִי (eli eli, my God, my God) and עֲזַבְתָּנִי (azavtani, you have forsaken me). The Gospels give the verb in its Aramaic form, sabachthani. Jesus took the words of the Hebrew Psalter and cried them out in the language of his home. Notice the verse numbers while you are there: Hebrew Bibles count the heading of a psalm as verse 1, so the words Jesus quoted are Psalm 22:2 in the Hebrew and in the interlinear, and Psalm 22:1 in English. The free tools will warn you about this; it is one of the first surprises of reading the Hebrew text.

This does not mean that the apostles always quoted the Hebrew. The New Testament writers often quoted the Old Testament in Greek, from the Septuagint, the Greek translation made in Egypt before the time of Christ, and the Koine Greek track explains why that matters. But the Septuagint is itself a translation of the Hebrew, and the Hebrew is the text that the Old Testament authors wrote and that every modern translation of the Old Testament works from. When you open the Hebrew of Psalm 22, you are reading the words David's psalm used and the words Jesus prayed.

There is a pastoral point in this. Three quarters of the Christian Bible is the Old Testament, and many preachers never preach it, or preach it only for its stories, partly because it feels foreign. Some of that strangeness is the strangeness of Hebrew itself: its poetry that rhymes ideas rather than sounds, its stories that leave so much unsaid, its names that are also sentences. A little Hebrew will not remove that strangeness. It will help you love it, and it will help you hear the Old Testament as Jesus heard it.

Here is what this track can honestly give you within a year, with a notebook and the free tools on a phone. First, it lets you see where one English word stands for several Hebrew words. The most important example is in almost every chapter. When the BSB prints LORD in capital letters it is translating the personal name of God, the four letters you will meet in Lesson 4. When it prints Lord with small letters it is translating a different word, the title lord or master. Psalm 110:1 has both: 'The LORD said to my Lord.' In the WLC that is נְאֻם יְהוָה לַאדֹנִי (ne'um YHWH ladoni, the declaration of the LORD to my lord). A reader who knows the difference can follow the argument Jesus builds on that verse in Matthew 22:41-46; a reader who does not will miss half of it.

Second, it lets you see what the Hebrew writers repeated and what sounds they played with. Genesis 2:7 says the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground. In Hebrew, man is הָאָדָם (ha'adam, the man) and the ground is הָאֲדָמָה (ha'adamah, the ground). The sound tells you what the sentence also says: the human being belongs to the earth he was taken from. Hebrew narrative and poetry are full of such links, and full of key words repeated through a story, and translations cannot always keep them. Modules 5 and 6 will teach you to look for them. Third, it shows you the shape of a poem. You will learn in the next two lessons that Psalm 119 is built on the alphabet, which no English translation can show except by printing the letters' names above the stanzas.

Fourth, it lets you find where the translations are making a choice, and why. When the BSB, the KJV and two or three other versions disagree about an Old Testament verse, a little Hebrew lets you open the interlinear and see whether they are reading the same Hebrew differently, following a different ancient manuscript, or choosing a different meaning of the same word. In the Old Testament the second of these is common, because translators compare the Hebrew with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, and Module 8 teaches you to find those places in the footnotes. And fifth, it opens the older commentaries, many of them free, whose Hebrew references are a closed door to readers who cannot recognise the letters.

Now what it cannot do. A little Hebrew has done as much damage in pulpits as a little Greek, and some of the damage is peculiar to Hebrew. You may have heard that each Hebrew letter is a picture with a hidden meaning, so that a word means what its letters' pictures add up to. It is not so. The letters began, more than three thousand years ago, as simple drawings, and some names, such as aleph and bet, probably come from words for ox and house; but no speaker of Hebrew ever built a word's meaning from its letters' pictures, any more than an English speaker reads cat as the sum of c, a and t. You may have heard that 'Hebrew has no word for' something, and that this proves a deep truth. Usually the claim is false, and when it is true it proves less than it seems. You may have heard that a word's root tells you its true meaning in every verse. It does not; words are used, and context decides. Module 2 names these traps one by one, as the Koine Greek track's 'What the Tools Cannot Do' does for Greek, and the Hermeneutics lesson 'Word Studies Done Properly' sets out the rules that keep a word study honest.

A little Hebrew also cannot overturn the translators. The committees that made the BSB and the other major versions include people who have read Hebrew every day for decades and who know the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint and the ancient languages around Israel. If you think they have all missed something obvious, the likeliest explanation is that you have. Your task is to understand what they chose and why, and to see where they disagree. And a little Hebrew cannot replace your own language. The church has read the Old Testament in translation from the beginning, starting with the Septuagint. If your congregation reads Swahili or Hausa or Portuguese, the Hebrew is a tool for helping them hear their own Bible better, not a reason to make them feel that their Bible is second best. The phrase 'the Hebrew says' should come out of a pulpit rarely, carefully, and always in a form the hearers can check.

This track ends with a full study of one Old Testament passage of your choice, done with every skill you will learn, and each lesson's practical step builds toward it. You need three things: a notebook kept only for Hebrew, the free tools on your phone, and the passage. Begin all three this week.

First, the notebook. Take a notebook, or a section of one, and write on the first page: My Hebrew notebook. Leave the next three pages blank; in the next three lessons you will copy the consonants and the vowels there by hand. On the fifth page write: My passage. On the last page write: Claims to test. Everything you learn in this track will end up on the pages in between.

Second, the tools. Install the Blue Letter Bible app from your phone's app store, or open blueletterbible.org in your phone's browser; both are free. Then open stepbible.org in your browser as well; STEP Bible is made by Tyndale House in Cambridge and is free, and it shows the Hebrew of the Leningrad Codex with the grammar of every word. In Blue Letter Bible, find Nehemiah 13:24, tap the verse, and choose the interlinear or tools option (the wording of the menu differs a little between the app and the website). You will see the Hebrew words with English under them. Find יְהוּדִית (yehudit), the word behind 'the language of Judah'. Copy it into your notebook, letter by letter, from right to left, with the transliteration and the English gloss the tool gives. Then do the same in STEP Bible, where tapping an English word shows the Hebrew behind it. Do not worry yet that you cannot read the letters. In three weeks you will.

Third, the passage. Choose an Old Testament passage of between five and twelve verses that you expect to preach or teach in the coming months, or one that matters to your church: a short story from Genesis, Ruth or Samuel, a psalm or part of one, a paragraph of a prophet. A psalm or a short narrative is a good first choice, because Modules 5 and 6 teach exactly those. Avoid, for now, the Aramaic chapters of Daniel and Ezra. Write the reference at the top of the My passage page and copy the passage out in full from the BSB or from the translation your church reads. You may change your mind in the next few weeks; by the end of this module you should settle it.

Last, take the claim you wrote down for the final inquiry question, the thing you once heard about 'the Hebrew'. Write it on the Claims to test page at the back of the notebook. You cannot check it yet. By the end of Module 2 you will be able to, and whether it turns out right, partly right or wrong, you will know why. Then pray for the people in your church who will never learn a word of Hebrew, and thank God for the translators who learned it for them. Nehemiah grieved over children who could not hear the language of the covenant. You are learning a little of it so that your people can hear it better in their own.