How to make Hebrew more accessible

Based on a presentation at the ETCBC / DAST research meeting on Wednesday 20 September 2023.

More than half of humanity identifies as Christian or Muslim, for whom the Scriptures of the Jewish people are holy. But of the billions who treasure the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament or Tawrah), only a tiny proportion have any understanding of the main language in which it was written. We seem to think that Hebrew is both unnecessary and beyond us. Is it, or are we missing out on something?

If you do not read Hebrew, what do you see if faced with a block of text like this? Look at it for a few moments and pay particular attention to your emotions.

This is Genesis 1:1-14 in Hebrew, copied from Parabible which uses the Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensia (BHS) as its textual source

Most of us see an impenetrable wall that stands between us and whatever lies behind. The wall is clearly text and therefore must be saying something, but we have no idea what it is. Emotionally, this is quite unsettling. We may feel vulnerable or even threatened. We may be curious but feel shut out. Even if we know some Hebrew, a whole passage like this may well remind us of how much we do not know, making us feel inadequate and despondent. Almost all of us are therefore relieved when we can turn away and will probably try to avoid being confronted with text like this again.

On the other hand, if you are a Hebrew scholar what do you see? Presumably there is something here that you love. What is it? Perhaps it is the aesthetic of the square script or the vividness of the original pictograms from which each letter developed; perhaps it is how systematic and regular the language is; perhaps it is the relative simplicity of the grammar (such as the lack of case endings); perhaps it is the sounds and rhythms of the texts as it is read out; perhaps it is the images and metaphors used, or the juxtapositions and connections that are made.

Whatever it is, the benefit of being able to read the Hebrew is not so much understanding what the text says (translations already enable us to do that) but rather understanding how it says it. The Hebrew enables us to enter into the world of the text at a greater depth so that it comes alive to us more fully.

There are already many wonderful tools that are widely available to us – especially in English – which in an instant will answer almost any question we may want to ask of the Hebrew text. Here is one example from Biblehub:

We can see a phonetic transcription to help us pronounce each word, an English translation to help us understand what it means, a morphological description to help us discern its grammatical form, and a link to the relevant entry in more than one lexicon (using a numerical index published by James Strong in 1890) where we can get further information, such as links to other verses in which this same word occurs. This is an amazing resource for which I for one am hugely grateful. Yet it does not help me feel the benefits that we were talking about above. It makes the language look complex and technical. I am not really sure what to focus on and I find myself almost ignoring the Hebrew itself.

Most of us are used to an encoding approach to foreign languages whereby we take something we can say in our own language and learn how to say it in another language, for example: “I” = “Ich”; “have” = “habe”; “eine” = “one”; “sister”; “Schwester.” It takes considerable effort to learn to say and write this (especially if we also learn the various ways in which each word will change if we put it in a different context). And at the end of the process we have not really grown at all: I already knew I had a sister and that information will be of no interest to almost any speaker of German that I may meet.

Taking this familiar approach with the Hebrew example above, I see that: “In the beginning” is written “ תיִ֖שׁאֵרְבּ ” (what?!) and is pronounced “bə-rê-šîṯ” (how do you say that?). Apparently it comprises a preposition (whatever that is) and a feminine singular noun (whatever that means), although I have no idea which part of the word is which. After repeating this difficult and bewildering process seven times in a row, I can tell you that the first verse of Genesis says: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” – which I already knew.

What might happen if we were to shift our perspective and tried to decode the text instead? Let us look at the first few verses of Genesis 1 again:

From the neat alignment on the right and the jagged edge on the left, we can deduce that the text runs from right to left, not from left to right. We can see that the text is mainly comprised of bold square shapes (presumably these are letters?), frequently with dots and dashes above or below. Two dots (׃) seem to appear at the end of every verse, sometimes followed by “פ” (presumably this is punctuation?). Just by observing my alien surroundings, I have already discovered several things I did not already know. And now I am keen to see what is next. Contrast these emotions with what I experienced before, when I welcomed being able to turn away from the text.

The next thing we will probably want to do is to start to recognise the different letters. But where to begin? Must we leave the text and work our way through an abstract alphabetical list? If we did, we would be told that the first letter is “א.” But by (computer-assisted) observation of the text, in fact the letter we see most often is “י”: on average it occurs a little more than once in every ten letters. With the next two most frequent letters (”ה” and ”ו“) we can already recognise a third of the text. I would never have imagined that! And, as an aside, those same three letters form the Tetragrammaton ( הוהי ), the name of God that is usually transcribed YHWH and pronounced “Yahweh," which we encounter nearly 7000 times in the Hebrew Bible.

Furthermore, “ו” is not just a letter but also a very frequent word (it makes up 12.5% of all the words in the Bible!), as we can see here: 

This is Genesis 1:1-10a in Hebrew using the search function at Parabible

Even though I have so far only learned a couple of letters of the alphabet, I can already recognise more than one in every ten words in the entire Hebrew Bible. The emotional and motivational impact of shifting focus from what we do not know to what we do is enormous.

This is how decoding works: it takes us into the text instead of away from it; it takes the text rather than ourselves as the focus of our attention rather than ourselves; it works from the most useful to the least. And it is much easier to do – especially for different individuals looking at different texts - with the aid of the digital technologies that we now have available to us.

For the teachers among us, who are familiar with the granular grammatical detail, the decoding approach is a prompt to zoom out and consider the text at a macro level: what really is the backbone of the language. What are the distinguishing features of Hebrew? It seems to me that the prime one is the triconsonantal root: a trinity of consonants which represents a key concept (eg. ךלמ represents “king”). The root can be expanded in different directions by adding letters to make particular words (eg. “queen” or “reign”) to which further letters can be added to make specific forms of those words (eg. “queens” or “(they) reigned”).

Of course, not all words have a triconsonantal root (for a start, some words are only one or two letters long!); sometimes the root is hard to discern or debatable; and there are “false friends” where two words appear to share the same root but are not related. Too much can be made of roots (or other etymological origins) in determining the meaning of a particular word, since the meaning of words regularly evolves with usage over time and is largely dependent on its use in a specific context. Not to mention, that the “dataset” that we have to work with for understanding biblical Hebrew as a language is extremely limited!

Nonetheless, this underlying principle in the development of the language is well attested and provides us with a practical key that we can use to begin to make sense of the unfamiliar text before us. There is a simple and exciting beauty about taking 22 consonant sounds, each represented by a letter; putting them into groups of three to make symbols which represent some 2000 fundamental concepts for society; expanding them according to agreed patterns to make about 8500 different words; and then further expanding those - again according to agreed patterns - to make the specific forms of those words of which the entire Hebrew Bible is composed. 

At the very least, this insight helps us to recognise a human logic to the language to which we can relate, which is vitally important in overcoming the emotional obstacles we have observed. To remove the psychological barrier, we must take the strangeness out of the text and find ways to identify with it. And again, spotting patterns and seeing the underlying framework from which we can begin to make sense of the text is much easier with digital technologies.

My hope is that this decoding approach may prove fruitful in significantly improving the accessibility of the Bible in its original languages and reducing general ignorance of Hebrew among Bible readers. And that it may ultimately lead to better scholarship, as more people are enabled to participate in the field.