How I’m Learning to Read Biblical Hebrew

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been learning to read Biblical Hebrew. I should say that I don’t think anyone has to learn the original languages to benefit from the Scriptures — nearly everyone in the world now has the Bible available in his or her own language, either the whole Bible or part of it. A good translation, especially one that includes the Divine Name, should be sufficient for a sincere person to understand the written Word.

However, in connection with the Edhai project, I wanted to have a good feel for how people spoke in Bible times. While eventually Akkadian, Aramaic, and Greek will no doubt be valuable, I thought Biblical Hebrew would be a good place to start.

To learn the language, I’ve been using a similar process that I used some years ago to learn to read Spanish. My basic process is to first read the passage in English, then read the same passage in the new language, but taking the time to analyze the passage until I can actually read it out loud with understanding.

Biblical Hebrew presents some special problems that I didn’t have with Spanish — that is, the alphabet and the vowel points. I have some linguistic training, which has helped me to figure out the pronunciation of the consonants and vowels.

However, I found that I needed to add some other aids beyond a Hebrew Bible. By far the most valuable resource has been the superb Interlinear Scripture Analyzer (ISA) software available free from Scripture 4 All. The scripture provides a literal word-by-word interlinear translation, as you can see from the sample shown here.

 

 

As you can see, in the Hebrew text and in the interlinear translation, the authors have faithfully included God’s name; they have used the common formulation “Yahweh” in their English interlinear rendering.

ISA is the most important additional tool I’m using for my project, but I’ve also found it useful to listen to the Hebrew Audio Bible available from the Academy of Ancient Languages. I also have a Hebrew primer, which has been useful for understanding grammar; a Hebrew lexicon that I use occasionally to research words, and a set of flash cards from Zondervan to help build vocabulary.

At first, I found I had to struggle for 10 or 15 minutes just to puzzle out a single word. However, now in that same amount of time I can read seven or eight verses with understanding. In some cases, I don’t even need anymore to refer to the interlinear.

I’m now up to Exodus 19 in this exciting Bible reading project.

ARK — 20 March 2012

Where in the world is A. Roy King?

Just a note to followers of this blog that I still exist. Even though I haven’t written a lot on this blog lately, I do follow very closely the traffic and comments on the pieces posted here, especially the article  ”Have Archaeologists Found Skeletons of Biblical Giants in Greece?,” which has been read tens of thousands of times and is one of the top articles on the web on this topic.

In recent months, I have been doing a lot of writing on environmental topics under another pen name, so I haven’t been able to give a lot of attention to this blog. However, I am moving forward with the Edhai project, a long-term historical fiction series set in ancient times.

I do intend to continue actively writing on this blog and promise to do so more in the near future.

ARK — 20 March 2012

 

Reflection on Pascal’s Wager

I was reflecting on Pascal’s Wager about God, which as  I understand it goes something like this:

If you believe in God and it turns out that there really is a God, you win because when you die you get an eternal reward.

If you don’t believe in God and it turns out there really is a God, you lose because when you die you get an eternal punishment.

If you believe in God and it turns out there really is no God, you lose, but the worse that happens is you waste time when you are alive and when you die you are just dead forever.

There’s a lot to say about this whole chain of reasoning, but my basic thought is that it would be foolish to think simply believing in God is enough to get the eternal reward in any case. Accepting Pascal’s reasoning in a simplistic way could lead you to just throw in your lot with the first religion that comes your way — you could end up wasting your time while you are alive and then be dead forever anyway. It’s certainly worth investigating whether there really is a God and then making a diligent search and a reason-based investigation to find out who that God is and what he expects of us — that information is available.

ARK — 22 April 2011

Catastrophism: Can Geological Processes Happen Rapidly?

In the popular mind, geological processes are extremely slow — the past was very much like the present, and the layers of soil, rock, and sediments that can be observed on cliffsides and in gorges were laid down very slowly, over thousands or millions of years. This concept of uniformitarianism is tied up in the popular imagination with evolution, which is also supposed to require eons of time to do its work.

Because geological uniformitarianism and evolutionism so conveniently prop one another up in so many people’s superficial beliefs about science, it’s not surprising that popular media don’t say much about catastrophism — the idea that geological processes can happen very quickly. Better not to complicate matters by revealing too many nuances and complexities.

Unfortunately, then, it often falls to creationist groups to present evidence that geological processes can happen very slowly or very quickly and that it can be hard to tell the difference. As an example, I thought this article from the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) was interesting: “Mt. St. Helens and Catastrophism,” by Steven A. Austin, Ph.D., chair of the geology department at ICR. ICR teams have studied the geological changes that occurred as a result of the Mt. St. Helens eruption. (The photo shown here is linked from the U.S. Forest Service web site about the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.)

Here is an interesting excerpt from Austin’s article:

Up to 400 feet thickness of strata have formed since 1980 at Mount St. Helens. These deposits accumulated from primary air blast, landslide, waves on the lake, pyroclastic flows, mudflows, air fall, and stream water. Perhaps the most surprising accumulations are the pyroclastic flow deposits amassed from ground-hugging, fluidized, turbulent slurries of fine volcanic debris, which moved at high velocities off the flank of the volcano as the eruption plume of debris over the volcano collapsed.

Austin adds that:

Conventionally, sedimentary laminae and beds are assumed to represent longer seasonal variations, or annual changes, as the layers accumulated very slowly. Mount St. Helens teaches us that the stratified layers commonly characterizing geological formations can form very rapidly by flow processes. Such features have been formed quickly underwater in laboratory sedimentation tanks, and it should not surprise us to see that they have formed in a natural catastrophe.

Austin’s article discusses rapid erosion that has occurred as a result of mudflows, including a 140-foot-deep canyon system. He also describes a mat of upright logs that has formed in spirit lake, which offer an alternative interpretation of petrified forests that have been found at other locations. Geological processes have also laid down a rapidly-form peat layer that resembles coal beds found in other locations.

AB — 16 February 2011

A. Roy King’s Blog:2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2010. That’s about 29 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 17 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 47 posts. There were 17 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was September 11th with 154 views. The most popular post that day was ‘Snowflake Method’ Offers Innovative Method for Writing a Novel.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, mail.yahoo.com, mail.live.com, and en.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for pangaea, pangea map, giant archaeological find in greece, pangaea map, and giants found in greece.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

‘Snowflake Method’ Offers Innovative Method for Writing a Novel September 2010
1 comment and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

2

Have Archaeologists Found Skeletons of Biblical Giants in Greece? May 2010
7 comments

3

Images of Pangaea October 2009

4

The Connection Between Halloween and the Great Flood October 2009
1 Like on WordPress.com,

5

Group Claims New Noah’s Ark Find on Ararat April 2010
1 comment

Did Biblical Hebrew Verb States Reflect the Long Lifetimes of Early Humans?

I’ve been intrigued by Biblical Hebrew’s lack of verb tenses (past, present, future) and what it might have to say about the psychology of the people who originally spoke it.

Considering the Bible account, it seems likely that Hebrew or something like it was the original human language. According to one way of thinking, the worshipers of the true God would not have gotten involved in the rebellious centralization and tower-building project of Nimrod and his cohorts, so presumably their language would not have been confused (see Gen 11:1-9). So the language of Jehovah’s true worshipers would have been preserved, and this would be the one in which the Bible got written.

Although the Bible writers were able to express ideas of past, present, and future, time as a factor in Hebrew verb expression has a relatively low priority. Rather, Hebrew verbs are expressed in two states, perfect (action completed) and imperfect (incomplete action).

Kyle M. Yates, in The Essentials of Biblical Hebrew, writes:

The time as understood in most modern languages is not the same as that of the Semitic mind. The discernment of the time of an action is not of vital importance to the Hebrew thought pattern. It is necessary for the Indo-germanic thinker only to fit the action into his overemphasized estimation of time. The understanding of the condition of the action as to its completeness or incompleteness was sufficient generally to the Semite and if not, there was some word of temporal or historical significance which would bring time into focus.

So the question is, what does this indicate about the psychology of the original speakers of this language? Did they have a different view of time from modern humans, because they had a longer lifespan (and originally the prospect of living forever)? Interestingly, the Bible encyclopedia Insight on the Scriptures (Vol. 1, Watchtower, 1988) follows this line of thinking:

If, as the Bible indicates, Hebrew was the original tongue used in Eden, this lack of emphasis on verbal time may reflect the outlook of man in his perfection, when the prospect of everlasting life was before Adam and when life had not been reduced to a mere 70 or 80 years.

– ARK, 3 Dec. 2010

New Translation of Holman Bible Increases Use of Yahweh in Its Text

I was impressed recently to see the ad shown to the right from Biblical Archaeology Review for May/June of 2010. In an age where most churchgoers effectively don’t even know the name of the God they profess to worship, it is impressive that translators would have the courage to include the name of the Bible’s divine Author in its text.

The Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) is published by B&H Publishing Group, a division of Lifeway Christian Resources. The organization has an earlier version of the HCSB available for free at MyStudyBible.com. This online version has some great study features. If you hover over key words in the text, you get a rollover displaying things like the word and pronunciation in the original language, definition, and information about how the HCSB renders that word in English throughout the text.

On playing around with the online version, one thing I noticed immediately was that in Gen. 2:4, the first place where the Tetragrammaton (YHWH or JHVH) appears in the Hebrew text, the HCSB disappointingly renders it “LORD,” as you would find in the King James version and its many derivatives. Hovering over “LORD” in that verse reveals that the online HCSB translates the name of God as a real name only 484 times, whereas it use the title “LORD” 5,925 times and “God” twice.

So the HCSB translators know how the original text reads, but they made a conscious decision to stick to the practice of post-Biblical Judaism and Christendom of using a euphemism most of the time and including God’s name fewer than 8 percent of the 6,413 times it appears in the Hebrew scriptures.

This was surprisingly to me, especially in light of the strong message conveyed in the Biblical Archaeology Review ad. So I sent a feedback message on the MyStudyBible Web site asking for their reasoning. I was happy to receive a very nice message from E. Ray Clendenen, associate editor and one of the HCSB translators.

Ray tells me that the online version of the translation is an older one and that the newer version of the translation uses Yahweh over 600 times and that the translation team intends to increase the divine Name’s usage more over time.

Ray says the team used the following guidelines for rendering the Tetragrammaton as Yahweh:

We use it as the rendering of YHWH (which the Hebrew Bible editors first rendered as Adonai, “Lord”) whenever God’s “name” is being given (either explicitly, using the word “name,” or implicitly), when He is being identified (“I am Yahweh”), when He is being contrasted to other gods such as Baal, in certain repeated phrases such as “Yahweh the God of your fathers,” or when YHWH has been rendered by Yahweh in the immediate context.

He admits that the translators have probably been inconsistent in some cases, but provides an interesting insight into why they thought it wiser to continue the practice of substituting “LORD” most of the time:

… our objective is to introduce to the contemporary church what is the most likely pronunciation of the divine name YHWH in the Hebrew Bible. We did not render the majority of occurrences of YHWH as Yahweh because our goal is not only to be accurate but to use an English style that is most familiar to people. Since most Christians today probably do not commonly speak of “Yahweh,” but rather of “the Lord,” we felt it would be insensitive to use Yahweh for YHWH in every case and would make the Bible seem too uncomfortable for most people.

I thought this was a frank and humble admission from someone with extensive credentials as a Biblical scholar, acknowledging the limitations of this fellow believers. He tells me that “We hope that the name will grow on people and that we can expand the uses of Yahweh in future editions.”

At the same time, there is something sad about this confession — that eminent Bible translators feel that they have to hold back the truth because their readers would feel uncomfortable with the name of the true God.

ARK — 23 Nov. 2010