Learn Biblical Hebrew

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Mar 2001 by Van Dyke Parunak, H

Learn Biblical Hebrew. By John H. Dobson. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1999, 310 pp. and audio tape, $33.50.

The methods of language pedagogy typically depend on whether the language is classical or modern. Classical languages (e.g. Latin, Koine Greek, Biblical Hebrew) have no living native speakers. Their introductory grammars typically emphasize rote memorization of paradigms and extensive translation exercises, and prepare the student to read ancient texts. Modern languages are intended to be spoken, not just read and written. Their texts emphasize the social context of language (e.g. a French grammar might have a chapter entitled, "Taking the train to Paris"), and make extensive use of spoken drills, either with a teacher or in a language laboratory. Dobson's introduction to Biblical Hebrew (BH) approaches a classical language as though it were modern. Dobson fully appreciates the significant differences between BH and Modern Hebrew, but he also appreciates that language is intrinsically behavioral rather than visual. He instructs students to review each lesson with the accompanying audio tape, which contains the exercises read aloud in a pronunciation close to Israeli Hebrew but with distinctions between long and short vowels that the modern language has lost. So strong is the aural emphasis that students are urged to work through the entire book before attempting to write Hebrew. The book is rich in mnemonic hints, such as miming words, singing along with songs on the tape, learning and using simple greetings and other interactions with fellow-- students, sketching pictures to illustrate Hebrew phrases and sentences, and acting out a sentence while speaking it aloud.

The emphasis is not on decoding each sentence fully before moving to the next, but rather on trying to capture the gist of the text, using the parallel English translation given alongside each selection, and on moving quickly through the first thirteen chapters to build a broad overview of the language before delving into details. The first chapter, introducing the alphabet and pronunciation, is the only early chapter that attempts to treat a topic thoroughly. The other early chapters frequently introduce bits of several topics that enable the student to read realistic sentences. Systematic summaries are deferred to later chapters, where they have the effect of reviewing and systematizing phenomena that the student has already encountered repeatedly. For example, the student reads Dent 6:4 (containing a noun in construct with a pronominal suffix) and Gen 1:5 (using waw-consecutive) in chap. 1, through the construct is not discussed until chap. 7, nor waw-consecutive until chap. 19. The student learns BH first by encountering it holistically, giving the mind the opportunity to induce its structure, and then only later reinforcing these intuitions with structured grammatical rules and paradigms. In fact, many details are deferred to the last 30 pages, which by their heading ("The Grammar of Biblical Hebrew") imply that the rest of the book is not to be considered a grammar.

The book is an introduction, suitable both for classroom use and for self-study, but it goes into some subjects not usually discussed until a second course. These include an extensive discussion of uses of perfective and imperfective aspects that are orthogonal to English instincts based in a tense system (chap. 21), the use and meaning of various clause sequences (chap. 22), a sensitive discussion of the differences between Hebrew prose and poetry (chap. 23), and a survey of idioms (chap. 25). Such an emphasis is expected from a member of the world's preeminent community of field linguists, but this expectation does not lessen the novelty of the approach or diminish its effectiveness.

Happy the class whose teacher is bold enough to take this unconventional but humane and scientifically sound approach to learning BH.

H. Van Dyke Parunak

ERIM Center for Electronic Commerce, Ann Arbor, MI