The Words That Matter Most

Joshua 1 opens with a death. Moses My servant is dead, the LORD says in verse 2, and Joshua is to take the people over the Jordan. Three times in nine verses he is told to be strong and courageous (1:6, 7, 9). Between the second and the third comes verse 8, and it is about a book. The man who will lead Israel's armies is told that his strength will come from keeping the law of Moses in his mouth. That is the setting in which this module begins to look at Hebrew words, because Joshua's charge is a charge about words: about the ones God gave, and about keeping them near enough to speak.

In the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), the free, public-domain text of the Hebrew Bible this track uses, the verse opens לֹא יָמוּשׁ סֵפֶר הַתּוֹרָה הַזֶּה מִפִּיךָ (lo yamush sefer hattorah hazzeh mippikha, this book of the law shall not depart from your mouth). יָמוּשׁ (yamush) is the qal imperfect, third person masculine singular, of the root מוּשׁ (mush, to depart, withdraw), and with לֹא (lo, not) in front it is a firm negative, the way Hebrew often states a command about the future. סֵפֶר הַתּוֹרָה (sefer hattorah) is a construct chain, the book of the law, of the kind Module 3 taught you to read. מִפִּיךָ (mippikha) is three pieces: the preposition מִן (min, from), shortened and joined to the front, the noun פֶּה (peh, mouth), and the ending ךָ (-kha, your).

Then comes וְהָגִיתָ בּוֹ יוֹמָם וָלַיְלָה (vehagita bo yomam valaylah, and you shall meditate on it by day and by night). וְהָגִיתָ (vehagita) is the qal perfect, second person masculine singular, of הגה (hagah, to murmur, meditate), with the conjunction וְ (ve-, and) in front; in a chain like this one, following an imperfect, the perfect with and carries the same forward-looking, commanding force, as Module 4 explained. The purpose follows: לְמַעַן תִּשְׁמֹר לַעֲשׂוֹת כְּכָל־הַכָּתוּב בּוֹ (lema'an tishmor la'asot kekhol-hakkatuv bo, so that you may keep to do according to all that is written in it). תִּשְׁמֹר (tishmor) is the qal imperfect, second masculine singular, of שָׁמַר (shamar, to keep, watch, take care), לַעֲשׂוֹת (la'asot) is the qal infinitive construct of עָשָׂה (asah, to do, make) with the preposition לְ (le-, to), and הַכָּתוּב (hakkatuv) is the qal passive participle of כָּתַב (katav, to write) with the article: the thing written.

The verse ends כִּי־אָז תַּצְלִיחַ אֶת־דְּרָכֶךָ וְאָז תַּשְׂכִּיל (ki-az tatsliach et-derakhekha ve'az taskil, for then you will make your way prosper, and then you will act wisely). Both verbs are hiphil imperfect, second person masculine singular: תַּצְלִיחַ (tatsliach) from צָלַח (tsalach, to prosper, succeed) and תַּשְׂכִּיל (taskil) from שָׂכַל (sakal, to have insight, act wisely, and so succeed). The BSB renders the pair prosper and succeed. The second verb is worth noticing, because its basic sense is insight and prudence: the success Joshua is promised is the success of a man who acts wisely because he knows the book. The same verb tsalach is used of Joseph: he became a successful man in his master's household in Genesis 39:2, and in a prison the LORD gave him success in whatever he did (39:23). Whatever the word promises, it is not a promise that a faithful man will never be in a prison.

Finally, the meditation itself. The verb הגה (hagah) is used of a lion growling over its prey in Isaiah 31:4, of a dove's moaning in Isaiah 38:14, of the nations plotting in Psalm 2:1, and of the blessed man meditating on the law in Psalm 1:2, the anchor of this track's ninth module. It is a sound word: a low murmur, a mutter, a growl, and from there the inward turning-over that goes with it. In Joshua 1:8 the book is in Joshua's mouth, so the picture is of a man reading the law under his breath, over and over, by day and by night. You may hear it preached that the Hebrew word for meditate means a cow chewing the cud. That can be a useful picture of turning a text over, but it is not in the word. Neither is the idea of emptying the mind. Hebrew meditation is full, not empty, and it is spoken.

Numbers about Hebrew vocabulary are repeated without their source, and they do not agree, so this lesson gives one set of figures and says exactly how they were made. They come from counting the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible, a free project on GitHub (openscriptures/morphhb) that tags every word of the WLC, version 4.20, with its dictionary form and its grammar. The dictionary forms are labelled with Strong's numbers, the numbers you see in Blue Letter Bible, extended with a letter where two different words share one number. Only the Hebrew parts were counted. The Aramaic chapters of Daniel and Ezra, Jeremiah 10:11 and the two Aramaic words of Genesis 31:47 were left out, and Module 8 has a lesson on them.

Hebrew raises a question Greek did not. A single written word often carries a small word joined to its front: and, the, in, to, as, from. If you count only the written words, the WLC's Hebrew has 301,837. If you count every piece the project tags as a word in its own right, the prefixes included, there are 416,755. This lesson uses the second count, because each of those prefixes is a word you must learn. On that count the Hebrew Old Testament uses 8,819 different dictionary forms, about 2,700 of them proper names of people and places. Of all the dictionary forms, 2,935 occur only once, though most of those are names; leave the names out and 1,854 words occur only once.

Now the figure that matters for a learner. On that count, 746 dictionary forms occur fifty times or more, and together they make up 87.3 percent of the text. Widen the net to words occurring ten times or more and you have 2,401 dictionary forms covering 96.0 percent. The ten commonest alone make up 36.6 percent of the text, and the commonest of all, the little וְ (ve-, and), makes up about one piece in every eight. Joshua 1:8 shows what that means in practice. Counted the same way it has thirty-two pieces built from twenty-six dictionary forms, and only two of those forms, mush (21 times) and hagah (25 times), occur fewer than fifty times in the Old Testament.

Other books give different totals, often a round figure of about eight thousand words or more. That is not a contradiction. The differences come from four places: whether the prefixes are counted as words, whether proper names are counted, whether two words that share a spelling are kept apart, and which edition of the text is used. Counted by plain Strong's number, without the extra letters, the same text has about 8,200 dictionary forms instead of 8,800. Strong's own Hebrew and Aramaic dictionary runs to 8,674 numbered entries. Blue Letter Bible's counts follow its own concordance and will not always match these. None of the differences changes the picture.

There is a lesson about honesty here that runs through this track. If you quote a number about Hebrew in a sermon or a class, say where it came from, and do not round it into something more impressive than it is. A student who says that about seven hundred and fifty words make up seven-eighths of the Hebrew Old Testament, counted in the WLC with the prefixes counted as words, has said something he can defend. A student who says that seven hundred words are all you need to read the Old Testament has said something false, and the next section explains why.

A share of the running text is not a share of the meaning. The words at the top of the list are the joints and hinges of the language: and, the, to, in, from, not, all, which, that, the sign of the object. They tell you how a sentence is built. The words that tell you what a sentence is about are spread far more thinly, and the rarer ones are often where the weight falls. In Joshua 1:8 the two rarest words are the two verbs that carry the charge: the book must not depart, and Joshua must murmur it. A reader who knew every common word in the verse and neither of those would know its shape but not its point.

Some rare words matter because the writer chose them for their sound. Isaiah 5:7 ends with a pair of puns: God looked for מִשְׁפָּט (mishpat, justice) and found מִשְׂפָּח (mispach, bloodshed), for צְדָקָה (tsedaqah, righteousness) and heard צְעָקָה (tse'aqah, a cry of distress). The word for bloodshed occurs nowhere else in the Old Testament. Isaiah seems to have reached for it, or made it, because it sounds almost like justice. The third lesson of this module comes back to that verse.

Some rare words are rare in all of Hebrew, and then even the experts are working from very little. Noah's ark is built of gopher wood in Genesis 6:14, and the word גֹּפֶר (gofer) occurs only there. No one knows what tree it was, and most English translations, the BSB among them, simply spell the Hebrew word in English letters. The poetry of the Old Testament, and the book of Job above all, is full of words that occur once or twice, and in some of them every translation is an informed guess. A footnote that says Hebrew uncertain or meaning of Hebrew uncertain is the translators being honest with you.

So the honest summary is this. Knowing the commonest seven hundred and fifty words will not let you read the Old Testament without help. It will let you read it with help far faster and far more alertly than you can now. You will see where a sentence turns, you will know most of what the interlinear is telling you before you tap it, and you will be able to spend your time where it is needed, on the rarer words that carry the weight.

Here are the twenty commonest dictionary forms, counted as section 2 describes, so that you can begin today. וְ (ve-, and) 50,520. הַ (ha-, the) 24,056. לְ (le-, to, for) 20,487. בְּ (be-, in, with, by) 15,620. אֵת (et, the sign of the definite object) 10,979. מִן (min, from, than) 7,633, counting both the free word and the shortened form joined to the front. יְהוָה (the divine name, rendered LORD) 6,521. עַל (al, on, over, against) 5,768. אֶל (el, to, toward) 5,516. כֹּל (kol, all, every) 5,415.

The next ten: אָמַר (amar, to say) 5,318. לֹא (lo, not) 5,191. אֲשֶׁר (asher, who, which, that) 4,955. בֵּן (ben, son) 4,940. כִּי (ki, for, that, because, when) 4,330. הָיָה (hayah, to be, become, happen) 3,575. כְּ (ke-, like, as) 2,910. עָשָׂה (asah, to do, make) 2,636. אֱלֹהִים (elohim, God, gods) 2,600. בּוֹא (bo, to come, go in) 2,592. Other tools and grammars will give slightly different numbers, for the reasons in section 2, and a few words near each other may change places. The shape of the list will not.

Notice what kind of words these are. All six at the top are prefixes or tiny particles, and only four of the twenty are nouns: the divine name, son, God, and כֹּל (kol), which Hebrew treats as a noun, the whole of something. Learning them is learning how Hebrew sentences are put together, which is why Module 3 spent a whole lesson on the little words joined to big ones. Notice too what is high on the list that English barely has. אֵת (et) has no English equivalent at all: it stands in front of a direct object that is definite, and it is not translated. You may hear it preached that the et in Genesis 1:1, spelled with the first and last letters of the alphabet, is a hidden sign of Christ as the Alpha and the Omega. The same word stands in front of the heavens and in front of the earth in that verse, and nearly eleven thousand times in all, including in 1 Kings 16:31, where Ahab served Baal. It is a piece of grammar. It points to the object of a verb, not to a hidden meaning.

One warning about the verbs. The commonest verbs in any language tend to be the most irregular, and Hebrew is no exception. אָמַר (amar, to say) appears most often as וַיֹּאמֶר (vayyomer, and he said), where the first letter of the root, aleph, is still written but no longer sounded. הָיָה (hayah) appears constantly as וַיְהִי (vayhi, and it came to pass), where the last letter of the root has gone. נָתַן (natan, to give) loses a letter in נָתַתִּי (natatti, I have given) in Genesis 15:18. A beginner who meets these forms and cannot find the root in them has not failed. He has met the weak verbs that every learner has to get used to, and the parsing in the free tools will give him the dictionary form until he knows it. Write these common forms on the backs of the cards for their verbs.

Notice, finally, that the glosses are only hooks. כִּי (ki) is listed as for, that, because, when, and sometimes the best English leaves it out or renders it surely. בֵּן (ben) is son, but in a phrase it can mark membership or age: a ben of sixty years is a man sixty years old (Genesis 25:26). Learn the gloss as a way to hold the word in memory, and let the uses you meet fill it in.

Learn the words in order of frequency, not in the order of the alphabet and not in the order you happen to meet them. The first fifty words give you more of the Old Testament than the next five hundred. If you have a first-year Hebrew grammar, use its lists; many modern grammars arrange their vocabulary by how often the words occur. If you have none, start with the twenty in section 4, then add the words of your own passage that occur fifty times or more, then the next most frequent words your tools show you. You can build a good list for nothing.

The Koine Greek lesson of the same name in this course describes the box method with paper cards in full, and it works the same way for Hebrew: new cards in box one, known cards moving up, missed cards going back, so that your time goes to the words you do not yet know. Here are the differences for Hebrew. On the front of each card write the Hebrew with its vowel points, large and clear, and say it aloud every time, with the pronunciation you learned in Module 1. For a noun, write whether it is masculine or feminine on the back, because Hebrew adjectives and verbs agree with it. For a verb, write the three letters of its root on the front, small, under the dictionary form, because you will meet the root in dozens of shapes.

Learning by roots needs one caution. Words built on the same three letters are often related in meaning, and the cards help each other: מֶלֶךְ (melekh, king) and מָלַךְ (malakh, to reign) are one family. But words with the same letters are not always related, and a root does not hold a secret meaning that every word built on it carries. The first lesson of Module 4 and the myths lesson of Module 2 gave examples. Use the family to remember the word. Let the passage tell you what it means.

Ten new words a day, five days a week, takes you through all 746 words that occur fifty times or more in about fifteen weeks, with ten minutes a day for review. Choose a fixed time and keep it, because a method you do every day beats a better method you do when you remember. Learn each word inside a phrase from scripture as well as on its own: וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה (vayyomer YHWH, and the LORD said), יוֹמָם וָלַיְלָה (yomam valaylah, day and night) from Joshua 1:8. When you meet the word in your reading, you will meet it as an old friend in a familiar place.

Turn to the page after My passage and write at the top: Words in my passage. Open your passage in the interlinear on Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible. Write down every Hebrew word in order, and where a word has a prefix, write the prefix and the main word on separate lines, since they are separate words to learn. Beside each one write its dictionary form and gloss, and the number of times it occurs, from the count your tool gives when you open the word. A passage of ten verses may have well over a hundred pieces, so give this two sittings if you need to. You only need to look each dictionary form up once.

Now mark the list. Circle every word that occurs fifty times or more. Draw a box round every word that occurs fewer than fifty times. Count the circles and the boxes and work out roughly what share of your passage the circled words make up. Compare it with the guess you wrote in the inquiry. Most students find that four in every five pieces, or more, are circled.

Then do three things. First, make cards for the twenty words in section 4 and for every circled word in your passage that is not among them, and put them all in box one. Begin your ten minutes tomorrow. Second, copy every boxed word onto a separate list headed Words to study, with its reference. These are the words that probably carry your passage's content, and the next three lessons will ask you to study the most important of them properly. Third, look up one word's count in both tools and write down whether they agree. If they do not, write a sentence saying why they might differ. Keep the list. Your capstone study at the end of this track will begin from it.