Category Archives: Languages

Greek, Hebrew, Quenya, Sindarin, Aramaic, Ugaritic and their writing systems

Weak Verb Charts

These PDF format charts are a distillation of the weak verb grammar that I teach, so there are some things that won’t make sense if you were not in my class. Eventually I will write a guide to using these pages. Still, if you have been through a first year Biblical Hebrew course, you should be able to figure out most of it. You may post a link to these resources, but please do not re-post the actual documents. I want to keep the most up to date versions here.There is a version number at the bottom of each page (and in the document name) with a date in this format: YYMMDD. Feel free to email me if you have questions.



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These charts, along with my Review Guide for a first semester Biblical Hebrew course will be kept on my Hebrew Resources page.

Learning Hebrew with Monty Python

I can get pretty creative (well, downright silly sometimes) in my BH classroom. I’ll do almost anything if I think it will help students remember a concept. If you are interested in understanding why some things “stick” in your mind, and why others fly out, you might like to read Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. That book is worthy of its own future post.

For now, take a look at an example of how some of my students indelibly sealed a verse that I taught them to sing in class (Ps 121.1, 2) into their memory.


Watch out Monty Python!

Keep Reading (Hebrew, that is)

One of the greatest challenges after a few semesters of Biblical Hebrew is to maintain your skills. Even more critical is to improve your skills! The single most efficient way to maintain and increase your BH is to read! But too many folks never find a way to make that happen. While there are many suggestions I could make (and will in the future!), today I want to encourage you to use one tool that should be in your BH toolbox. What? You have misplaced your toolbox? Get another one started!
Continue reading →

The Art of Translating

This is a quote from Touchstone Magazine. It touches on some of the discussions regarding translating that we’ve been having in our Proverbs class. I think it is really helpful in showing the complexities and decisions made when we (attempt to) translate.

Word to the Wise by ANTHONY ESOLEN (excerpt)

Dante is often obscure: He coins odd words; he uses forms from outside Tuscany; sometimes he is deliberately archaic; sometimes he wants his syntax tangled. When I translated The Divine Comedy, I assumed that my job was not to sand smooth what the Great One had left rough. It astonishes me to see translators do to the Word of God what I have struggled so hard, even within the severe constraints of meter and rhyme, not to do to Dante. I would not have presumed to do it.

One of my guiding principles in translation has been to retain what is strange in the original language, especially when it is embedded in an old metaphor. So if that cranky materialist Lucretius uses the word suffulcit to mean that a certain premise “supports” a conclusion, I uncover the odd metaphor hidden in the literal meaning of the word: “props up”.

People who do not write poetry (and maybe some people nowadays who do, but who are too busy expressing their feelings to learn anything about it) always assume that poets are more abstract than prose writers, but precisely the opposite is true, with only rare and partial exceptions among the second-rank poets (Thomas Gray). That is a reason their language is sometimes strange—even to their original readers.

So the biblical language is sometimes strange. Let it be. So people do not always understand. The better then to suggest to them that in fact they do not understand it, and that there are mysteries whose surfaces they have only begun to peer into.

If the Bible, at once immediately accessible by children and yet embracing unfathomable truths, does not sometimes suggest the depth of an infinite sea, the translators ought to be sent packing. Let ’em translate signs in train stations, where dynamic equivalence serves some immediate practical purpose.

Source:
Esolen, Anthony
2006 “Word to the Wise”, Touchstone 19.10, 4-5.

HT: Fred Putnam

Daily Hebrew

Here’s a great way to keep your Hebrew alive and well! Each day a short passage is accompanied by vocabulary helps (for vocab occurring fewer than 50x) and grammar annotations. Check it out here (every day!).

dailyhebrew.gif

HT: Sam Boyd (this is from one of his fellow University of Chicago classmates).

What’s in a Name?

I thought I would give a brief linguistic explanation for little Jireh’s name.

Jireh Hebrew

It comes from the Hebrew verb ??????? (yir’eh) which is a qal imperfect (3rd person, mascular singular) form of the verb ??? which has as its first English gloss “to see.” However, the semantic range can extend from that basic idea to mean “to look out for; to see to it; to provide.”

In Genesis 22:8 and 14 (in the story of Abraham offering up his son Isaac) we see the form that Hannah and Philip chose for Jireh’s name. In those passages we read:
Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together. (Gen. 22:8, ESV)

So Abraham called the name of that place, ‘The Lord will provide‘; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.’ (Gen. 22:14, ESV)

The Lord has provided this special son to Hannah and Philip, and He will continue to provide everything that Jireh will need in his life.

Study Helps

OK, I admit it. I love to organize things. And I’m a very visual learner. So, for any of my language courses I usually design a notebook for the translation work and get it bound (at www.lulu.com an online on-demand print company). I also decided that the best way for me to remember the Hebrew weak verb rules was to take all those pages of notes and create a two page “at-a-glance” sheet.

I’m making the PDFs for the Hebrew Weak Verb charts available here to anyone who wants to use them. I’m also making available the PDFs for my translation workbooks for OTHT2 and NT223 (Acts & Paul). These are the translation sections assigned for Spring 2006. Nothing fancy, just the text with space to write your parsings/translations in. If you want to get them printed and bound, I’ll post links to the www.lulu.com site where you can order them. I don’t get any money, you just pay them to do the printing and they ship it to you. That’s how I do it for myself (and for Mark). I like the convenience of having all the pages in one place. If you decide to order from lulu.com, just remember that it takes about a week (sometimes longer) for them to print it and for you to receive it.

OK, copyright disclaimer: I created the Weak Verb charts, so I own the copyright. The other workbooks are simply for the people in class who I know already own the BHS or Bible software and who could photocopy or print out their own copy anyway, this is just one person helping other students get it in the format that is more useful. I don’t get any financial benefit from this. If you use the lulu.com site, you are paying for them to print it like you would pay the photocopier to copy your book. Don’t abuse this! If I am totally wrong about this, I will pull the workbooks off and just leave the weak verb charts.

I would have posted these earlier, but I didn’t think anyone would be interested! In class some people have seen my workbook and have asked about it, so I decided to just put the documents here (rather than try to remember who to email them to).


To download the PDF of just the text (no cover) click on the thumbnail. To get the book printed and bound or to download a PDF copy for free click here.


To download the PDF of just the text (no cover) click on the thumbnail. To get the book printed and bound or to download a PDF copy for free click here.

 

I appreciate any comments if any of this is helpful (especially for the weak verb chart because I have other study helps I am working on for Hebrew and Greek also).