I’ve been slowly working my way through the Hebrew Scriptures, reading the Hebrew and English in parallel so as to read with understanding — I described my process previously in my article “How I’m Learning to Read Biblical Hebrew.”
Years ago when I started reading the Bible (online access to the Bible here), I found it a real chore to get through books two through five of the Pentateuch — Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — because of the focus on the details of the Law and the Israelite genealogy, and especially the repetitiveness of the text.
But now that I’m using that text to learn the original language, I’m finding that the repetitiveness is a learning aid. For example, I’m now reading Numbers 7, in which chieftains of each of the 12 tribes bring in one-by-one the same offering of dishes and flour and bulls and rams and so on. The repetition in the text is actually helping me to learn the Hebrew words for these things. And rather than boring me, that repetition is helping me to engage more deeply with the text.
I don’t know whether other students have had the same experience, and I have no idea whether the text was structured that way partly on purpose. But I can say that it’s working out that way for me.
ARK — 26 August 2014
A. Roy King 