Biblical Hebrew Blog by ClassicalHebrew.com

 It may be asked what is the relevance of Learning Biblical Hebrew today in the age of multiple translations?

Depending on your preference you can choose a variety of texts that emphasize different aspects of the biblical hebrew text- some highlight the Bible’s roots of Judaism with particular attention to the ways the character and names of God are revealed. Other translations reflect the age we live in with gender conscious attention to the text, while others aim to give a translation of an idea rather than a straight word for word translation. At the end of the day all these materials are enriching for us and allow us to tap into some special resources that scholars have labored over for us to enjoy. However all these materials are but a reflection of the beauty of the original text. How many of us have read poetry in translation? Reading the works of Pablo Neruda or Khalid Gibran are drops of beauty, but reading their poems in the originals (even without understanding), one begins to feel the pace and rhythm that exudes from each sentence, a phenomenon difficult to capture in translation.

“Lost in Translation”
 What then do we in fact lose when we read only in translation? We have spoken about the difficulty with poetry but these problems can even extend into prose. For example when reading of Goliath’s approach to the river bed and his speech against the camp of Saul we feel the anticipation that is built up in the story- and this comes through clearly in the translations, however what we miss is how the text changes its rhythm and pace as it portrays Goliath. The very character of the Hebrew words are telling another story aside from the dual between Goliath and David- they are describing the laborious movements of Goliath in the change of rhythm, the pace of the sentences become short when Goliath is talking which gives us the impression that we are dealing with a giant slow in speech and not the agile and sharp warrior we may have envisioned otherwise.

All the more is to be gained from reading the bible in the original language.

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The main source of water in ancient Jerusalem was the Gihon spring, located just outside the city walls. When the Assyrians waged an attack against Judah towards the end of the 8^th century BCE, led by king Sennacherib, king Hezekiah realized that in order to sustain throughout an Assyrian siege, the city must be better protected and the water must be accessible from inside the walls of the city. Hezekiah, considered to be one of the better kings of Judah both from a moral standing and as a leader of the people, substantially enlarged the area surrounded by a defensive wall to include more civilians, and built a tunnel that led the water from the Gihon spring into the city. Thus, when the Assyrians attacked in 701, Jerusalem withstood their attack and they eventually withdrew. The great importance of Hezekiah’s building projects is emphasized in the summary of his reign: “And the rest of the deeds of Hezekiah and all his might and the building of the pool and the tunnel bringing the water into the city are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah” (2 Kings 20:20).

While the tunnel had been well known, the Siloam inscription was discovered by accident in 1880 by a young student from the nearby mission, who happened to look up while walking through the dark tunnel and noticed the inscription. The Siloam tunnel is a rare case in which we have an archaeological finding, including a written inscription, which enriches our knowledge of a biblical report of events. In order to build the tunnel, the workers split into two teams, digging from either end of the future tunnel while following a crack in the rock. When the two work-teams approached each other, they heard the sound of the axes of the other team and knew that the breaking through of the tunnel was almost complete. The inscription they placed at the place of the meeting of the two teams describes the day on which this meeting occurred.

The Siloam inscription is one of the only pieces of written evidence surviving from the First Temple period. Aside from the historical data it provides, it also supplies us with knowledge of the scribal practices of the time (separation of words using dots), the evolution of Ancient Hebrew handwriting, and facts about grammar and pronunciation which are very valuable to the linguistic research of biblical Hebrew.
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Like many middle-eastern languages, Hebrew is a member of the family known as the Semitic languages. This name follows the biblical description of the post-deluvian divide between the sons of Noa – Shem, Ham and Japheth, who divided according to their nations and languages. The acknowledgement of this fact and the investigation of the languages surrounding biblical Hebrew can assist us in better understanding the language we strive to learn.

Like any family, a family of languages is defined when we have the ability to define a common source from which all the members of the family evolved, and a set of rules that can explain the different stages of evolution and the outcomes of these processes in the different languages. In the case of Hebrew, the joint ancestor is a conjectured language, of which we have no actual proof, labeled as “proto-Semitic.” This archetypal language developed over many centuries, branched off into many smaller branches, and eventually became many different languages, all similar in some respects but also very different in others, as distant relatives often are. An example of the close kinship between all these different languages can be found in joint vocabulary such as the consonants mlk, which denote the word “king” in many of the members of the Semitic family of languages.

Hebrew is defined as part of the more specific family of North-Western Semitic languages, a branch including Arabic, Aramaic, Canaanite languages and Ugaritic. Most similar to Hebrew are of course her fellow Canaanite languages (or possibly even dialects) such as Ammonite and Moabite. These languages have close vocabulary, grammatical and morphological ties. For example, in all these languages, a long ā sound found in other Semitic languages becomes a long ō sound, a clear-cut characteristic that enables us to identify whether or not a language is Canaanite.

Despite the fact that it is not a Canaanite language, Ugaritic is extremely close to Biblical Hebrew. Seeing that the Ugaritic culture is closely tied with the Canaanite, this is a good example of the fact that culture and language often go together and that the influences of one are often discovered when researching the other.

Once becoming a language of its own, Hebrew also underwent many changes and influences, from early Biblical Hebrew – the earliest recorded form – to Second Temple Hebrew, influenced immensely by Aramaic, the Hebrew of the Rabbis, and finally, Modern Hebrew.

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Biblical Hebrew - The Alphabet - Lesson 1