Setting the Bar High in the Study of Ancient Hebrew

(1) The only way to learn a language well is to spend a God-awful amount of time with it.

(2) The only way to learn a language well is to read great gobs of it.

In the course of decades of reading, I’ve reduced to tatters a Snaith, a BHK, two BHSs, two Korens, and two JPS Hebrew-English Tanakhs (these last two are full of annotations to NJPSV with regard to translation options).

Mind you, that’s also because I traveled and relocated constantly over those decades. I always have a Hebrew Bible with me, in my backpack, briefcase, on the car seat, and on my desk. There is often one on my nightstand, though not in the bathroom; I do have rules. My wife will remember a birthday party she threw for me while we were both in seminary. After an hour of socializing, I had had enough, and snuck off into a corner to read Hebrew, oblivious to my surroundings.

Most people zone out into a world of their own on a regular basis. For some, it’s the sniff of motor oil, music, a crossword puzzle, or knitting that serves the purpose. For me, it has always been Hebrew.

The more text a student of ancient Hebrew has read such that she or he can sight-read it six months or more thereafter, the more Hebrew a student actually knows.

The best way to help students achieve this level of mastery is by setting the bar high in intermediate and advanced courses. In my view, someone with a graduate degree that includes a major in ancient Hebrew should be able to sight-read and exegete in accordance with a range of critical methods no less than half the corpus of ancient Hebrew literature inclusive of the Bible, epigraphic Hebrew, the Hebrew of Ben Sira, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Mishnah, and the piyyutim.

That’s the major in ancient Hebrew of my dreams. As of now, the final exam of my dreams is not one I could pass. What will I do when I can? Raise the bar all over again.

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

No place is off limits to the study of Torah - I would disagree with anyone who says otherwise. It is God who makes ablutions possible.

[JohnFH]

Now, Bob, we know where you do your best studying.

[Iyov]

The traditional appeal is to Deuteronomy 23:13:-15. It says you are supposed to go to the bathroom outside the camp (and cover your waste) because "the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you, let your camp be holy; let Him not find anything unseemly among you and turn away from you." For better or worse, there is a clear teaching of holiness as "keeping separate" -- which is the literal meaning of kedusha.

[Suzanne]

From the locker room to the bog.

[Iyov]

To the contrary, the Torah is about refining ourselves and our land through holiness -- though the Mishkan, teshuvah, tefillah and through ourselves. Locker rooms are mentioned as places of unholiness, and it is no mitzvah to visit one. (Mikvehs are another matter, but that's mostly for women to cure their lunar curse.)

But since you prefer the Way of the Smart retort, or as Joyce put it in a mammoth triple pun: "Old Gavelkind the Gamper and he’s as daff as you’re erse", perhaps you would like Joyce's vulgar meditation on gender-based language in Finnegan's Wake:

Intend. From gramma’s grammar she has it that if there is a third person, mascarine, phelinine or nuder, being spoken abad it moods prosodes from a person speaking to her second which is the direct object that has been spoken to, with and at. Take the dative with his oblative for, even if obsolete, it is always of interest, so spake gramma on the impetus of her imperative, only mind your genderous towards his reflexives such that I was to your grappa (Bott’s trousend, hore a man uff!) when him was me hedon and mine, what the lewdy saying, his analectual pygmyhop. There is comfortism in the knowledge that often hate on first hearing comes of love by second sight. Have your little sintalks in the dunk of subjunctions, dual in duel and prude with pruriel, but even the aoriest chaparound whatever plaudered perfect anent prettydotes and haec genua omnia may perhaps chance to be about to be in the case to be becoming a pale peterwright in spite of all your tense accusatives whilstly you’re wallfloored like your gerandiums for the better half of a yearn or sob. It’s a wild’s kitten, my dear, who can tell a wilkling from a warthog. For you may be as practical as is predicable but you must have the proper sort of accident to meet that kind of a being with a difference. Flame at his fumbles but freeze on his fist. Every letter is a godsend, ardent Ares, brusque Boreas and glib Ganymede like zealous Zeus, the O’Meghisthest of all. To me or not to me. Satis thy quest on. Werbungsap! Jeg suis, vos wore a gentleman, thou arr, I am a quean. Is a game over? The game goes on. Cookcook! Search me. The beggar the maid the bigger the mauler. And the greater the patrarc the griefer the pinch. And that’s what your doctor knows. O love it is the commonknounest thing how it pashes the plutous and the paupe. Pop! And egg she active or spoon she passive, all them fine clauses in Lindley’s and Murrey’s never braught the participle of a present to a desponent hortatrixy, vindicatively I say it, from her postconditional future. Lumpsome is who lumpsum pays. Quantity counts though accents falter. Yoking apart and oblique orations parsed to one side, a brat, alanna, can choose from so many, be he a sollicitor’s appendix, a pipe clerk or free functionist flyswatter, that perfect little cad, from the languors and weakness of limberlimbed lassihood till the head, back and heartaches of waxedup womanage and heaps on heaps of other things too.

Want Greek, footnotes, marginal notes, and even more explicit language? Go read the original.

[JohnFH]

I hope you find the time, Iyov, to write more about kedusha. Stephen over at Emerging from Babel is working on it from a Ricoeurian perspective, but he starts out with the negative side (defilement) before discussing the positive, a risk we run here as well.

[Randall Buth]

>(2) The only way to learn a language well is to read great gobs of it.

As mentioned, this needs to be within or on top of a framework of fluent communication in the language.

A thought experiment: if a person reads 'gobs of German', without ever orally communicating in the language, and at length, will they be able to think in and with the language? I think not. The 'German for Reading' grad student is a potential case in point. Nor would I recommend such a plan for someone devoting their life to German literature. Nor do good German departments follow such a course.

The bar needs to be raised, amen, and the infrastructure of the whole field needs to be changed to include oral communication.

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