Hebrew in the Study

This module is about what happens to your Hebrew once the course is over and Sunday is coming. Everything so far has been taught one point at a time: the letters and vowel points, the free tools, nouns and particles, the verb and its stems, narrative and poetry, words, the text and its translation. A working pastor does not meet the Old Testament one point at a time. He meets a passage on a Monday, often a long one, with a sermon or a Bible study due at the end of the week and a dozen other demands on the same days. If the Hebrew does not become a routine, it will become a memory. So the module begins with a routine, and with the psalm that stands at the door of the Psalter.

Psalm 1:2 is the anchor: 'But his delight is in the Law of the LORD, and on His law he meditates day and night.' In the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), the standard printed form of the Hebrew text and free on both STEP Bible and Blue Letter Bible, the verse opens with כִּי אִם (ki im, but rather) and then reads בְּתוֹרַת יְהוָה חֶפְצוֹ (betorat YHWH cheftso, in the law of the LORD is his delight). Notice the order. The phrase in the law of the LORD comes before the noun it describes, so the sentence leans on the law before it ever mentions the man's delight. Then comes the verb: יֶהְגֶּה (yehgeh, he meditates), a Qal imperfect, third person masculine singular, of the root הגה (hagah). The imperfect here presents a habit, something the man does again and again, and the time phrase that closes the verse, יוֹמָם וָלָיְלָה (yomam valaylah, by day and by night), says the habit runs through the whole of time.

What does hagah mean? Here the tools teach a lesson that the lesson Hebrew Myths and Word-Study Traps warned about from the other side. Look the verb up and you will find it used of a lion growling over its prey (Isaiah 31:4), of Hezekiah moaning like a dove (Isaiah 38:14), of a tongue that 'mutters injustice' (Isaiah 59:3), of the mouth of the righteous that utters wisdom (Psalm 37:30), and of a man thinking of God through the watches of the night (Psalm 63:6). It is tempting to preach that the blessed man growls over the law like a lion over its meat. That is an illegitimate transfer: the lion belongs to Isaiah's sentence, not to the psalmist's. What the range does show, honestly, is that the verb often involves sound. Many scholars think that meditation in Psalm 1 included reading or reciting the words half aloud, under the breath, as ancient readers commonly did, and Joshua 1:8 supports this by tying the same habit to the mouth: the Book of the Law 'must not depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night.' Others point out that in Psalm 63:6 and Psalm 143:5 the verb is plainly inward thought, so the sound should not be pressed. Write that down as probable, not certain.

Either way, the picture is of a man who keeps the words of God near him, in his mouth and in his mind, through ordinary days and sleepless nights, because he delights in them. That is the shape of a pastor's study at its best. It is not a heroic session on Saturday night. It is a habit that grows out of love, and it is done a little every day. The Septuagint, the Greek translation made before Christ, rendered the verb with meletao, the same verb Paul uses when he tells Timothy to be diligent in these matters (1 Timothy 4:15), a verse the Koine Greek lesson Keeping Your Greek Alive also quotes. Psalm 1 says that the one who lives this way is like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding its fruit in season. The fruit is not instant. It comes in its season, from roots that have been drinking all along.

Before the routine itself, be clear about what job the Hebrew is doing, because a student who expects too much of it will either give up or start inventing. This track promised enough Hebrew to check what the text says and to weigh a translation's decisions for yourself. That is a modest goal and a very valuable one. In an ordinary week the Hebrew has three tasks. First, to show you where your translation has made a choice, so that you know which English words are carrying a decision. Second, to let you test a claim you have heard about the passage, in a sermon, a commentary or online, and in Old Testament preaching there are many such claims. Third, to slow you down, because reading a verse word by word in an interlinear makes you see what your eye skims over in English.

It is not the Hebrew's job to give you a meaning that every translation has missed. The translators of the BSB and of every major version, and of the Bible in your own language, knew far more Hebrew than this course can teach. If, in the middle of the week, you discover that a verse means something no translation has ever seen, stop. The likeliest explanation is that you have made a mistake. That does not mean translations are never wrong, and the lesson Comparing Old Testament Translations showed how often they differ for good reasons. It means the burden of proof is yours, and your conclusion should be written in pencil until someone who knows more has looked at it.

The Old Testament makes two demands that the New Testament does not, and the routine has to allow for them. The first is length. The Old Testament is about three quarters of the Bible, and its units are often long: a narrative may run for a chapter or two, a prophetic oracle for many verses. You cannot parse every word of 1 Samuel 17 in a week, and you should not try. In narrative, the Hebrew work usually happens at the level of the key words, the chain of verbs and the dialogue, as the lessons How Hebrew Tells a Story, Key Words and Repetition and The Narrative Chain (Wayyiqtol) taught. In poetry, it happens at the level of the parallel lines and the images, as Parallelism and Imagery and Metaphor taught. Choose one to three verses where the weight of the passage falls, and do your closest Hebrew work there.

The second demand is distance. Old Testament passages come from a world further from ours than Paul's churches, with customs, laws, wars and forms of speech that need explaining. Much of what a congregation needs to understand an Old Testament passage is not Hebrew at all but setting: who is speaking, to whom, under which king, and why. That belongs to the Old Testament Survey track, and you should keep its lessons near. A good rule of proportion is that most of the week's study is not Hebrew. It is reading the passage many times in your own language, reading the book around it, learning its setting, praying over it, and thinking about the people who will hear it. If the Hebrew work takes more than about a third of your time, you are probably over-reading small details. If it takes none, you have stopped using what you learned.

What follows assumes that you teach or preach once a week, that you have a phone with Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible, a notebook and a pen, and about thirty minutes a day. If your week is shaped differently, move the days and keep the order. The routine is the same shape as the one in the Koine Greek lesson Greek in the Study, adapted for the Old Testament, and if you have taken that track you will recognise it.

Monday: choose the passage, bound it, and read it. Decide where the unit begins and ends by reading the chapter around it; the Homiletics lesson Choosing and Bounding the Text explains how. Then read the passage many times in your own language, at least once aloud, and read the whole book if it is short or the surrounding chapters if it is long. Write every question you have. One practical point: Hebrew Bibles and English Bibles do not always number verses the same way. In many psalms the Hebrew counts the title as verse 1, so the BSB's Psalm 63:6 is 63:7 in the WLC, and a few chapters divide differently in the prophets. If a tool seems to show the wrong verse, look one verse on.

Tuesday: compare translations and read the footnotes. Read the passage in three or four translations side by side and mark every difference that changes the sense. Then read the translators' footnotes, which in the Old Testament often tell you where a translation has followed the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls or another ancient version rather than the Masoretic Text, or where the Hebrew is uncertain. The lessons Comparing Old Testament Translations, The Masoretic Text, The Dead Sea Scrolls and The Septuagint taught you what those notes mean. The list you make today is your agenda for the rest of the week.

Wednesday: sound it out and find the verbs. Open your key verses in the interlinear, as Reading Right to Left in an Interlinear taught, and read the Hebrew aloud, word by word, slowly. Then list the verbs and parse the main ones with the codes you learned in Reading Hebrew Parsing Codes: stem, conjugation, person, gender, number and root. Check the main verbs in two tools. In narrative, mark the chain of wayyiqtol verbs and every place it breaks, because a break often marks background, a flashback or a pause. In poetry, mark the parallel lines and what the second line does with the first. Ask what each verb form contributes, and remember the cautions of The Seven Stems and Perfect and Imperfect against making a stem or a conjugation carry more than it can.

Thursday: two or three key words. Choose the words your passage turns on. For each, read the lexicon entry, as Strong's, BDB and Gesenius taught, look at the word's range, find where the same book or writer uses it, and let the context choose the meaning. Then test yourself against every trap in Hebrew Myths and Word-Study Traps: no letter pictures, no root fallacy, no claim that Hebrew has no word for something, no carrying every possible meaning into one verse. The covenant words, the justice words and the words for glory, soul and heart, taught in Words and Meaning, will come up again and again.

Friday: the main idea and the honesty column. Write one sentence that says what the passage is about and what it says about it. Then, and only then, read whatever others have written, if you have it: a study Bible, a commentary, notes from a teacher. Compare their work with yours. Saturday: prepare to teach, and choose at most one or two Hebrew observations to mention, using the tests in the next lesson, Preaching with Hebrew. Sunday: teach, and rest. Thirty minutes a day for six days is three hours, which is more careful study than many sermons receive.

Here is the routine worked on one well-known verse, so that you can see what each day produces. Micah 6:8 reads: 'He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?'

Monday. Reading Micah 6:1-8 shows that the verse is the end of a courtroom scene. The mountains are summoned to hear 'the LORD's indictment', for 'the LORD has a case against His people' (6:2). God recounts what he has done for them (6:3-5). Then a worshipper asks, in rising extravagance, what he should bring: burnt offerings, year-old calves, thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil, even his firstborn (6:6-7). Verse 8 is the answer. Write that down, because it governs everything else: the verse is not a general ethical motto but God's reply to someone trying to buy his favour.

Tuesday. The translations agree closely, but some render the last phrase walk humbly and others something like walk carefully or wisely with your God, and a footnote may say the Hebrew is uncertain. Write that down; it is your main question for the week. If you can see the Septuagint on STEP Bible, you will find it says something different again, be ready to walk with the Lord your God. That is a sign that ancient translators also found the phrase hard.

Wednesday. In the WLC the verse opens with הִגִּיד לְךָ (higgid lekha, he has declared to you), a Hiphil perfect, third person masculine singular, of נגד: he has made it known, and the Septuagint, interestingly, makes it passive. Then comes דּוֹרֵשׁ (doresh, requiring, seeking), a Qal participle, masculine singular, of דרשׁ, the verb rendered study in Ezra 7:10. Then three phrases: עֲשׂוֹת מִשְׁפָּט (asot mishpat, doing justice), with a Qal infinitive construct of עשׂה; וְאַהֲבַת חֶסֶד (ve'ahavat chesed, and love of mercy), which the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible tags as a noun in the construct, love of, though some grammars treat it as an infinitive, to love; and וְהַצְנֵעַ לֶכֶת (vehatsnea lekhet, and making your walking humble), a Hiphil infinitive absolute of צנע followed by a Qal infinitive construct of הלך, to walk. Here is a lesson in checking tools against each other: where they label a form differently, the English sense may not change at all, and you should say so rather than build on the label.

Thursday. Two words carry most of the verse's theology, and both were taught in Words and Meaning. מִשְׁפָּט (mishpat) is justice, the right ordering of relationships and the fair judgement of cases, and Righteousness, Justice and Peace showed how often it is paired with righteousness in the prophets. חֶסֶד (chesed) is the covenant word taught in Covenant Words. The BSB renders it mercy here, but in Psalm 117:2 it renders the same word 'loving devotion', and a congregation with a Strong's tool on their phones can see that. Then the hard word. The verb צנע occurs only here in the Hebrew Bible, and the related adjective only once, in Proverbs 11:2, where the BSB has 'with humility comes wisdom'. So the meaning of humbly rests on very little evidence. The traditional rendering is humbly or modestly; some scholars propose carefully, attentively or wisely instead, and ancient translators, as Tuesday showed, were already guessing. This is exactly what your honesty column is for.

Friday. A main idea might read: when people try to buy God's favour with ever greater offerings, God answers that he has already shown what is good, a life of justice, of covenant love, and of walking with him in humility. Then compare with whatever commentary you have. Saturday. Choose one Hebrew point to teach. The best one is not the rare verb, which would leave the congregation with a puzzle; it is the word chesed, which shows them that the mercy of Micah 6:8 is the same covenant love that runs through the whole Old Testament, and which they can trace in their own Bibles. The rare verb deserves at most one honest sentence: the word translated humbly is used only here, and humbly is the best-supported sense.

Keep each week's work on a double page of your notebook. On the left, write the passage reference, your questions from Monday, your list of translation differences from Tuesday, your verbs with their parsing from Wednesday, and your key words from Thursday. On the right, write your findings, and beside every one of them a single word in a narrow column: certain, probable or possible. Certain means the tools agree and the meaning is not disputed. Probable means it is the best reading but careful people differ. Possible means it is a suggestion you found attractive but cannot prove. In the Micah example, that the verse answers 6:6-7 is certain; that chesed is covenant love is certain; that humbly is the right sense of the rare verb is probable; that meditating in Psalm 1 was murmured aloud is probable. When you come to teach, the column tells you how to speak.

The column is a discipline of honesty, and it protects your people. Old Testament preaching is full of claims stated as certainties that are at best possible: that a Hebrew letter hides a picture with a message, that a name in a genealogy spells out a gospel sentence, that a verb form proves a doctrine. A preacher who has learned to write probable and possible in his own notebook will be slower to say such things from the pulpit, and quicker to notice when he hears them. If you are unsure which word to write, write the more modest one.

Many readers of this course are bivocational. If you farm, teach school, drive or trade six days a week, thirty minutes a day may be impossible. Then keep the order and shorten each step rather than skipping to the end. A shorter routine fits into three evenings: on the first, read the passage many times and compare two translations; on the second, sound out the key verse and parse its main verbs; on the third, check one key word and write the main idea. That is perhaps an hour of Hebrew, and it will still catch most of what matters. And if a week passes with no study at all, do not abandon the routine. Begin again on Monday. The blessed man of Psalm 1 is not described as never missing a day; he is described as delighting in the law.

Your practical step this week. Choose the Old Testament passage you will next teach or hear taught, and write it at the top of a fresh double page. Then work the routine for one week, writing your results for each day, with the honesty column beside them. If you have no passage of your own, use Psalm 1 itself: on Wednesday parse the three verbs of verse 1 and the verb of verse 2, and on Thursday look up the word blessed in 1:1 and the word delight in 1:2. At the end of the week, write two sentences: the main idea of the passage, and the one Hebrew observation you would share with your people, in plain words, pointing to a verse in their own Bible.