Keeping Your Hebrew Alive

The Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4-9, begins with שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל (shema yisra'el, hear, O Israel), and Jews have recited it daily since ancient times; when Jesus was asked which commandment is the most important, he began with it (Mark 12:29). Its second paragraph is this lesson's anchor: 'These words I am commanding you today are to be upon your hearts. And you shall teach them diligently to your children and speak of them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.' It is about keeping God's words alive across a lifetime and across generations, which is exactly the problem every student of Hebrew faces once the course is over.

Look at the Hebrew of the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC). Verse 6 ends with עַל־לְבָבֶךָ (al-levavekha, upon your heart). The heart is singular, and so is the you: the suffix is second person masculine singular, as it is through the whole passage. The BSB renders it 'your hearts', which is good English for a whole people, but the Hebrew speaks to Israel as one person, and so to each person in Israel. Before the words are taught to anyone else, they are to be on the teacher's own heart. The lesson Glory, Soul and Heart explained that the heart in Hebrew is the seat of thought and will as well as feeling. Words on the heart are words a person thinks with.

Then verse 7 begins with וְשִׁנַּנְתָּם (veshinnantam, and you shall teach them diligently), a Piel sequential perfect, second person masculine singular, of the root שׁנן, with a third person masculine plural suffix, them, referring back to the words. Here the honest word study of the inquiry matters. This is the only place in the Hebrew Bible where the root appears in the Piel. In the Qal it means to sharpen, of a sword (Deuteronomy 32:41) or of tongues (Psalm 64:3). Many lexicons connect the two and take the Piel as teaching incisively, sharpening the words into the children. That may be right, but it rests on one occurrence, and some scholars connect the word instead with a related root meaning to repeat. The Septuagint simply has you shall instruct them. So preach the verse as a command to teach thoroughly and repeatedly, which every reading supports, and offer the sharpening picture, if at all, as a possibility.

Then comes a series of four infinitives, exactly the construction the lesson Commands, Infinitives and Participles taught. בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ בְּבֵיתֶךָ (beshivtekha beveitekha, in your sitting in your house) and וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ בַדֶּרֶךְ (uvlekhtekha vadderekh, and in your walking on the road), then וּבְשָׁכְבְּךָ וּבְקוּמֶךָ (uvshokhbekha uvqumekha, and in your lying down and in your rising). Each is an infinitive construct with the preposition bet, in, and the suffix your, as Pronouns and Suffixes taught. Two pairs of opposites stand for the whole of life. This is not a command to set aside a holy hour. It is a command to weave the words into the hours you already have. That is also the secret of keeping Hebrew alive.

Verses 8 and 9 go on to the hands, the forehead, the doorposts and the gates, and in time Jewish practice took them literally, with small boxes containing these verses worn at prayer and fixed to doorposts. Jesus did not condemn the practice, but he did rebuke those who made a show of it: 'They broaden their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels' (Matthew 23:5). There is a warning here for a student of Hebrew. Hebrew letters are beautiful, and it is easy to make them into decoration, a word on a wall, a pendant, a tattoo, a word dropped into a sermon to impress. None of that keeps the words alive. What keeps them alive is the order of verse 6 and verse 7: first on your heart, then on your lips, then taught to the next generation, in the ordinary hours of the day.

Most pastors who learn some Hebrew lose most of it within a few years, and they lose it faster than Greek. The reasons are not mysterious. The letters are unfamiliar and run the other way. The vowels are small marks that the eye stops seeing if it is out of practice. The vocabulary shares almost nothing with English or the other languages of Europe, so for most readers there are few familiar words to lean on; speakers of a related language such as Arabic, Amharic or Tigrinya will find more help. And the Old Testament is large, with many words that occur only a handful of times. A student who does not read Hebrew for six months may find, on opening an interlinear, that he can no longer sound out a simple word.

The Koine Greek lesson Keeping Your Greek Alive described the research on forgetting that goes back to Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1880s: what is not reviewed is lost quickly, and each time it is recalled, it is lost more slowly. The same is true of Hebrew, only more so. The practical conclusion is the same too. Small, regular use keeps far more than large, occasional effort. Ten minutes a day, six days a week, is an hour a week and more than fifty hours a year, spread in the way memory likes best. A pastor who reads ten minutes of Hebrew a day will, after a year, read better than he did at the end of this course. A pastor who promises himself a long Hebrew session on his day off, and keeps the promise twice a year, will lose nearly everything.

Life has seasons, and the method has to survive them. A farmer at harvest, a mother with a new baby, a pastor in a month of funerals, a student in examinations: each will have weeks when even ten minutes is too much. In those weeks, shrink the habit rather than drop it. Read one verse instead of three. Say aloud one verse you have learned by heart, on the walk or in bed. Open Psalm 117 and read its two short verses. The goal in a hard season is not progress but contact, so that when the season ends the letters are still familiar and the habit is still there to pick up. Deuteronomy 6:7 includes lying down: there is always a moment before sleep.

Be clear about what you are keeping. This track has not made you a fluent reader of Hebrew, and ten minutes a day will not make you one quickly. What you are keeping is a set of skills: sounding out the letters and vowels, using the interlinear and the lexicon, recognising the common words, the common prefixes and suffixes, the shape of the main stems and conjugations, and the habits of narrative and poetry. Those skills are what make the weekly routine of Hebrew in the Study possible. If they go, the routine goes, and with it the ability to check what you hear and what you teach.

Choose a time and a place, and keep them. Put the reading next to something you already do every day, after morning prayer, before the first cup of tea, at the start of the walk to work, so that the one carries the other. Deuteronomy 6:7 names sitting, walking, lying down and rising; any of them will do. It matters less which you choose than that you choose.

Then read in two passes. In the first pass, open a verse in the interlinear on STEP Bible or Blue Letter Bible and read the Hebrew aloud, word by word, using the transliteration only when you are stuck. In the second pass, tap the words you do not know, read their glosses and parsing, and then read the verse aloud again. Write any word you had to look up three times at the back of your notebook. That is all. Do not try to parse every form, and do not turn the ten minutes into a study session. The point is contact with the text, every day.

Use the word list at the back of your notebook. Once a week, read down it and cover the English with your hand, saying each Hebrew word and its meaning. When you can give a word's meaning three weeks running, tick it and stop reviewing it. You will find that the same words keep returning, because a fairly small core of words makes up a large part of the Hebrew Bible, as the lesson The Words That Matter Most showed. Every word you keep makes the next verse easier. Do not try to learn the rare words; look them up each time, and let the common ones become old friends.

Begin in the Psalms, for three reasons. The psalms are short, so a reader can finish one in a few days and feel the progress. Their vocabulary repeats: the same words for the LORD, for praise, trust, enemies, the righteous and the wicked, steadfast love and faithfulness come back again and again. And they are already the prayer book of the church, so reading them in Hebrew feeds devotion as well as memory. Start with the shortest chapter in the Bible, Psalm 117. In the WLC it opens הַלְלוּ אֶת־יְהוָה כָּל־גּוֹיִם (hallelu et-YHWH kol-goyim, praise the LORD, all nations), with הַלְלוּ, a Piel imperative, second person masculine plural, of הלל. Verse 2 gives the reason: כִּי גָבַר עָלֵינוּ חַסְדּוֹ (ki gavar aleinu chasdo, for great toward us is his loving devotion), with גָבַר, a Qal perfect, third person masculine singular, of גבר, to be strong or prevail. And it ends with הַלְלוּ־יָהּ (hallelu-yah), the word every Christian already knows: praise Yah, the short form of the divine name. Two verses, perhaps three days of reading, and you have met the imperative, the perfect, a suffix, the covenant word chesed and the divine name.

From Psalm 117, go on to Psalm 1, which you met in Hebrew in the Study, then to Psalm 23, which A Poem: Psalm 23 worked through, then to Psalms 121, 131 and 133, all short songs. After the psalms, read narrative, which uses a smaller and more regular set of verb forms: Ruth, which A Narrative Passage: Ruth 1 began, Jonah, and the stories of Genesis. Over a few years, ten minutes a day will take you through a good part of the Psalter and several whole books. A reader who has worked through those slowly will know Hebrew better than many who once passed an examination in it.

Alongside the reading, learn a few verses by heart in Hebrew, one a month. The Shema's first line is the obvious place to start. The priestly blessing is another: Numbers 6:24 in the WLC is יְבָרֶכְךָ יְהוָה וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ (yevarekhekha YHWH veyishmerekha, may the LORD bless you and keep you), a Piel jussive and a Qal jussive, both third person masculine singular, with the suffix you. A verse known by heart cannot be lost when the phone is out of charge, and it keeps the sounds and shapes of Hebrew in the mind between readings. When you miss a day, do not try to catch up by reading twice as much. Read your ten minutes. When you miss a month, go back to Psalm 117 and begin again.

Everything you need for ten minutes a day is free. STEP Bible, made by Tyndale House in Cambridge, shows the Hebrew text with an interlinear, a brief lexicon for every word and the parsing, and also includes the Septuagint for comparison; it runs in a phone's browser. Blue Letter Bible, as a free app or website, gives the Hebrew interlinear with Strong's numbers, Gesenius' lexicon and a concordance. These are the two tools this track has used throughout, and either is enough.

For those who want to go further, more is free than most pastors realise. The Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible project publishes the Westminster Leningrad Codex with the root and the full parsing of every word, free on the internet, and it is the text many free apps are built on. Sefaria, a free Jewish library, shows the Hebrew Bible with English translations and with the Jewish commentators beside it, which is a good way to see how the text has been read in the synagogue. The great reference works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are now in the public domain and can be downloaded from the Internet Archive: the Hebrew and English Lexicon of Brown, Driver and Briggs (1906), and Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar in the English edition of A. E. Cowley (1910). They are old, and the lesson Strong's, BDB and Gesenius explained their limits, but they are still used by scholars. And there are free recordings of the Hebrew Bible read aloud, for example on the Mechon Mamre site, which let you hear the text while you follow it on the screen.

One warning. Free resources vary in quality, and some free Hebrew sites and videos are built around exactly the myths the lesson Hebrew Myths and Word-Study Traps warned against: letter pictures, hidden codes, secret meanings that only the site's author has found. Prefer the tools that show you the text, the lexicon and the parsing and let you judge. Be wary of any resource whose main offer is a meaning no translation has seen.

Many readers of this course pay for every megabyte of data, or have a signal only in town. A few habits help. Do your ten minutes on the same few verses for several days, so that a page loaded once can be read again without loading it afresh. Where you have a computer, STEP Bible can also be downloaded and used without an internet connection. Copy the Hebrew of a short psalm, with its transliteration and glosses, into your notebook by hand when you have a signal, and read from the notebook when you do not; copying it out is itself good practice in the letters. And a printed Hebrew Bible, if one ever comes your way through a church, a library or a Bible Society, is worth keeping, because it needs no battery at all.

Hebrew read alone is easily abandoned. Hebrew read with even one other person is far more likely to last. Think of one or two people in your church or district who have studied some Hebrew, or who would like to: another pastor, a teacher, a student, a young person with a good memory and a phone. Agree on a small amount, three to five verses a week, and meet once a week in person, by phone or by voice notes, to read the verses aloud to each other and to share what you each noticed. Keep it short and keep it regular. A group that reads Psalm 117 in its first fortnight and Psalm 1 in its first month has started well.

If there is truly no one near you who wants to read Hebrew, you are not without help. Read aloud anyway, because the sound of the words is half of keeping them. Record yourself reading a verse on your phone and listen to it on the road the next day. Pray the psalm you are reading, in your own language, line by line, after you have read it in Hebrew, so that the reading is not only an exercise but a conversation with the God whose words they are. And keep a note of questions you cannot answer, so that when you do meet a teacher, a visiting pastor or a fellow student of this course, you have something to ask. A solitary reader who keeps going for a year will often find that others want to join him once they see what he is doing.

Deuteronomy 6:7 names the children first. A pastor who keeps his Hebrew alive has something to give his own household and the young people of his church that very few of them will ever otherwise receive. It need not be much. A child can learn the Hebrew alphabet from Psalm 119, whose sections follow the order of the letters, as the lessons on the consonants showed, or learn to say shema yisra'el and hallelu-yah and know what they mean. Older young people can be shown how to open the interlinear on a phone and look up a word for themselves. The aim is not to make scholars but to show the next generation that the words of God came in a real language, and that ordinary people can open it. That is what Psalm 78 meant by telling the coming generation, 'even children yet to be born'.

Your practical step this week. Choose your time and place for ten minutes a day, write them in your notebook, and begin tomorrow with Psalm 117 on STEP Bible or Blue Letter Bible, reading in two passes as section 3 describes. Read the same two verses for three days. Start a word list at the back of your notebook. On the fourth day, begin Psalm 1. Choose one verse to learn by heart this month, the first line of the Shema or Numbers 6:24, and say it aloud each morning. Then invite one person to read with you, three to five verses a week. At the end of the week, write how many days you read, and one thing you noticed in the Hebrew of Psalm 117 that you had not noticed in English.