02.25.08
When I Grow Up, Part 2
I missed journaling last week, but Calvin has decided to be gracious and let me off the hook this first time, as long as I journal twice this week. If I forget one, however, my sentence is four cups of coffee instead of just two. I’d better get going!
In my last post I reviewed how I arrived at where I am now. Now, I’ll take some time to explore my initial thoughts about the things I love most.
First and foremost on my list of loves is Hebrew: I’ve been studying Hebrew for 5 years now, if you include the time that I was out of school not actively “studying” but still working with the language through teaching and personal use. I first learned Hebrew using Biblical Hebrew: A Text and Workbook (1st Edition) by Bonnie Pedrotti Kittel and others. We affectionately called the textbook “Bonnie” in my undergrad, a habit I still have today. The difference between this book and learning Hebrew from a “grammar,” is that “Bonnie” is inductive. Lesson one after we learned the aleph-bet started with the ubiquitous ויאמר יהוה (and Adonai said). In other words, a phrase straight from the Biblical text, rather than made up sentences until we “learned enough.” My professor was insistent on keeping our translations rough, especially in the first year of Hebrew. He would say, “We aren’t learning to translate, we’re learning to read Hebrew.” Personally, I feel I have a much better grasp on why Hebrew works the way it does and says things in the way it says them now, than if I had just learned, “When you see this phrase, it’s best translated into this English wording.” No, instead, I can read the Hebrew phrase and not have to put it into smooth English in order to understand it.
Though certain language professors here might have a heart attack if they knew, I did learn diagnostics rather than endless lists of paradigms, and scored A’s all throughout Hebrew at Davis and here at GCTS too, despite that fact. No, I can’t reproduce for you the Niphal 3rd heh imperfect paradigm, but I could recognize such a verb if I saw one, and meaning no disrespect to anyone, I daresay that’s better than most of these professors graduated MDiv students in the pastorate can do now. I am of course, not meaning to toot my own horn, just lamenting the eventual erosion of knowledge because people simply don’t learn to love it, and thus keep up on it. Obviously people do learn to love it the “standard way,” but I think there’s room for some lovin’ from the less academically inclined as well.
That’s really my whole point in this contemplation-turned-rant about Hebrew, I suppose. I have learned to think of Hebrew as a much-loved friend, an art form, not a mechanical scientific method. Of course, one can’t get away without memorization - there’s always vocab, and there are some things (like the verb endings) that you just have to know. I realize that somewhere down the line, since I’m going to study the language more professionally, I may really need to know what the vowel under R2 is, so that I can claim complete mastery over the language. But for the majority of pastors and laypeople, this is more than enough! And I daresay that if we taught Hebrew this way, more pastors would remember what they learn in seminary (and perhaps even enjoy it!) and maybe teaching laypeople Biblical languages wouldn’t seem like such a crazy idea.
Calvin recently alerted me to another style of teaching the language that I would love to experiment with. It’s a completely inductive method that utilizes now common theories on modern language study - in other words, learn to speak the language as if you were a child, and so become fluent in it. Most interestingly, they claim that this way, your reading proficiency in the Biblical languages will increase dramatically. Note that I said reading proficiency, not the ability to translate. Meaning, I could really take my Hebrew Bible to church and follow along, reading it fluently as if I was a “native,” thinking in the language. What a thrill that would be! Even after 5 years I still can’t do that. We hope to pick up the at-home materials this summer to take a look.
I suppose a theme is emerging from all this rambling about Hebrew. 1) I love Hebrew 2) I love Hebrew partially because of the way I’ve been taught 3) I want to pass on my knowledge of Hebrew to other people in a way that they too will learn to love it 4) I think inductive study is the best way to do it, especially for pastors or laypeople.
So what does this have to do with what I’m going to do with my life? Well, for one, whatever it is, it has to involve Hebrew. For two, I am determined to spread the influence of Hebrew (and Greek, though I don’t know it yet) beyond the realm of scholars into the lives of everyday Christians, who really can learn it, despite what they may insist. Why, though? It’s certainly not for the sake of knowledge. No, it’s because it so greatly enhances our ability to understand the Hebrew Bible. One would laugh if you met someone who called themselves a scholar of some ancient civilization or text, and they didn’t know the original languages that civilization spoke and wrote in! Laypeople aren’t scholars, but there’s no reason they can’t know the original languages of something evangelicals claim is the foundation of their faith!
I don’t know if this got me any further on deciding a dissertation topic or what school I want to go to, but I’m sure somewhere down the line this side path will come in handy. I didn’t mean to talk quite this much about Hebrew, so I guess I’ll have to save my next love, where Hebrew naturally leads, the Hebrew Bible, for next time.
