Starting to Think in Biblical Hebrew
I don’t know about you, but I find that summer vacations sometimes drag a little. Back in May, I returned from Cambridge, MA to the village in which I grew up, Lindfield, which lies deep in the countryside to the south of London, UK. If you’ve ever wanted to visit Hobbiton, come to Lindfield. Our chief attractions include a pond, a violin shop, and a Medieval bakery. We won the best-kept village competition in our area so frequently that we were told to withdraw to give others a chance. I love Lindfield – I really do – but after a week I was a bit bored. After a month, I desperately needed to do something. Help finally came, two weeks ago, in the form of a Biblical Hebrew course at University College, London.
As it turns out,Biblical Hebrew is really hard. By the end of day one, I had just about got myhead round the alphabet and Masoretic pointing (the series of dots and linesused to indicate vowels). The following morning, I remembered a third of it atbest. On day three, we began to look at verbs. When I turned to the back of mytextbook, there were eleven pages of verb tables in tiny font (I now know one).For practice translations, the textbook used real Old Testament passages, butremoved all the verses it didn’t think we could handle, which was often quite afew. When we did ‘The Flood, Part One’, for instance, it jumped straight fromGenesis 6:17 to 7:17. I still failed to translate either verse correctly.
The more I understood,however, the more I appreciated the nuances of the language. Biblical Hebrewhas a beautiful logicality about it. Once you know the root (three keyconsonants) of a verb, you can see how other words are formed from it, and thenrecognize faint echoes all over the place. When (eventually) I could actuallyread the selected verses of the Flood story, for instance, I started to notice parallelsbetween the descriptions of creatures in Genesis 1 and Genesis 8. Hebrew tendsto use far fewer words than English, which allows for wonderful brevity. InGenesis 29:20, when the author says that although Jacob had to work for sevenyears to be able to marry Rachel, the phrase “though it only seemed like a fewdays because of his love for her” takes merely six words in the Hebrew.
What struck me mostover the two weeks, however, was the scale of the cultural and linguistic debtwhich English has to the Old Testament. The best illustration I came across wasthe work of a remarkable Nineteenth-Century man named Isaac Salkinson. Born toa Jewish family in Lithuania, Salkinson became a scholar of Hebrew and ended upin London, where he converted to Christianity. Fifteen years later, he went asa missionary to Vienna, with the aim of translating the New Testament intoHebrew. At the same time, however, he translated two Shakespeare plays intoHebrew – Othello and Romeo and Juliet – having already translatedParadise Lost. Salkinson’s translations are extraordinarily elegant andloyal to the original texts, but they also use Old Testament phrases astranslations where possible. When you put Salkinson’s translations andShakespeare’s text side-by-side, it becomes apparent just how many words,phrases and concepts in Shakespeare’s English have roots in the Hebrew Bible.
So, on the one hand,I’d thoroughly recommend learning Biblical Hebrew (or New Testament Greek) ifyou get the chance. Even a little study would show you plenty about thenuances, connections and pure beauty of God’s Word. But on the other, I wasreminded over the last couple of weeks just how much better I could – perhapsought – to know the Bible in my own tongue. Sometimes, I read a Christianauthor or talk to an older person at church and get the sense that they don’tjust know lots about the Bible, or even lots of Bible verses (both greatthings), but are so steeped in it they seem to think and reason and praythrough it, in its rhythms and on its terms. There are some pages of Augustineor John Bunyan – two personal favorites – where if you tried to footnote everyallusion to a Bible verse, you’d end up with a whole second page. And there aresome older folk at church here in Lindfield whose wisdom constantly echoes withall they’ve read and learnt from the Bible over many years, whatever it is thatwe happen to be discussing. Maybe you know someone similar.
So, even though I’mstill pretty terrible at Biblical Hebrew, studying it for two weeks –appreciating the beauty of a few lines in Genesis, or seeing just how manyEnglish idioms are owed to it - gave me more of a taste for that kind of Bibleknowledge, and more of a grasp of just how much I lack it. And meanwhile, I’mback in Hobbiton with a lot of homework.
Dan Sutton is an upcoming DPhil candidate in Classics at Oxford University.