Comments on: May 2007 SBL Forum: Getting Wired without Vowel Pointing and More Tombs http://biblical-studies.ca/blog/2007/05/09/may-2007-sbl-forum-getting-wired-without-vowel-pointing-and-more-tombs/ My musings on Biblical Studies, Biblical Hebrew, Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, Popular Culture, Religion, Software, and pretty much anything else that interests me! Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:50:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: EV http://biblical-studies.ca/blog/2007/05/09/may-2007-sbl-forum-getting-wired-without-vowel-pointing-and-more-tombs/comment-page-1/#comment-132486 EV Sat, 12 May 2007 22:09:12 +0000 http://biblical-studies.ca/blog/wp/2007/05/09/may-2007-sbl-forum-getting-wired-without-vowel-pointing-and-more-tombs/#comment-132486 Ever since I entered the above comment, I’ve been thinking about the way Biblical Hebrew instruction is conducted in Christian universities and am wondering if it isn’t time to reassess. In the Jewish world there already exists an approach to teaching Modern Hebrew with an eye toward segueing into Biblical Hebrew (embodied by Feldheim’s text Ha-Yesod, for example). I made the case above that Modern Hebrew can greatly facilitate learning Biblical Hebrew, and I don’t think that a two-year BibHeb program would necessarily have to be extended to accommodate, say, a one- or two-semester Modern Hebrew intro. After the first year, those wishing to pursue further ModHeb instruction (those on a mission track, for instance) could branch in that direction.

]]> By: EV http://biblical-studies.ca/blog/2007/05/09/may-2007-sbl-forum-getting-wired-without-vowel-pointing-and-more-tombs/comment-page-1/#comment-132148 EV Fri, 11 May 2007 06:01:00 +0000 http://biblical-studies.ca/blog/wp/2007/05/09/may-2007-sbl-forum-getting-wired-without-vowel-pointing-and-more-tombs/#comment-132148 I’m going to offer a solution which has it both ways. Before signing up for Biblical Hebrew, I took a year of Modern Hebrew at my community college. As Griffin notes, dispensing with the pointing, which is the case with Modern Hebrew, does allow one to cover other aspects of the language more quickly. Moreover, the advantage of Modern Hebrew instruction is that, as a living language, much of it is appropriated aurally through classroom and lab practice. Therefore, by the time I received Biblical Hebrew instruction, the assorted pronunciation rules having to do with propretonic reduction and the like were already intuitively apprehended. These weren’t strange rules with myriad exceptions. Rather, they gave meaning to what had been learned aurally.

Modern Hebrew is close enough to Biblical Hebrew that most of what I learned was applicable and allowed me to advance through two years of BibHeb in one year. Almost all of the verbs I learned in first-year ModHeb appeared in the BibHeb instruction. Given that I consider the conjugation of verbs through the various binyanim to be the greatest challenge in learning Hebrew, this area of overlap afforded a sizable advantage.

Lastly, preceding BibHeb with ModHeb imparted a valuable conversational skill. Therefore, I recommend both routes: learn the language first without pointing via ModHeb instruction. Then learn BibHeb in the conventional manner.

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