Learning Hebrew
The subjects I offer to teach include the three great classical ancient languages that lie at the basis of our Western civilisation: Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Of these three, unless you come from an observant Jewish background, Hebrew can easily seem the most remote and exotic. For a start, like its sister language Arabic, it is written from right to left in a script far more alien-looking than the Greek alphabet. Then, although the kinship may not leap out at us straight away, Latin and Greek do belong to the same family of languages, the extensive Indo-European family, as English. More immediately, they have both made a huge contribution down the centuries to English vocabulary (the vocabulary of this article being very much a case in point) that ought to lessen their foreignness to us. There are practically no such helpful links between English and Hebrew. Together wiith Arabic and Amharic, the chief language of Ethiopia, Hebrew belongs instead to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family.* Its vocabulary is totally outlandish to us, apart from the few words, such as "amen", "hallelujah" and "Sabbath", and the many personal names that have passed from the Old Testament into Christian tradition; while the Semitic verb system behaves quite differently from Indo-European verbs. The one feature that Semitic and Indo-European languages do share is grammatical gender, the distinction of nouns as either masculine or feminine (nothing is neuter for the Semites), and that is the very feature that English, though itself Indo-European, manages happily without: no gender, please, we're British.
Yet, for all its unfamiliar aspects and its superficial complexities, Hebrew is at bottom a simple and economical language. It is telegraphically terse: ”The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” and "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord" each take a mere four short words to say in the original Psalms. (The beautifully cadenced version of the former by Coverdale in the Book of Common Prayer, “The Lord is my shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing”, further expands on the Hebrew, addinjg a "therefore"; but Coverdale was no Hebraist and based his Bible translation chiefly on the Latin of the Vulgate instead of going right to the sources like King James’s team of translators.) The Hebrew noun is largely uninflected, in contrast to Greek and Latin and the modern Slavic languages, or even classical Arabic; and Hebrew syntax is always fairly basic, though not incapable of subtlety or variety within its limits. Nor is it incapable of rolling periods, - witness that stylistic masterpiece Deuteronomy, - but these are achieved by different means from the complex sentences that are possible in Latin, English or German. As an instrument of literary expression, Hebrew has a far greater simplicity and directness than either Latin or Greek (even Homeric Greek) – a simplicity and directness that come over strongly enough in the King James English Bible, which follows the Hebrew practically word for word. This means that the student can begin to engage with the actual Hebrew scriptures at an earlier stage than the student of Latin can start reading Cicero or Virgil.
The distinctly consonantal nature of Hebrew is one of the Semitic characteristics that it shares with, say, Arabic. Its alphabet includes only consonants, though four of these, the alef, he, vav and yod, may also represent vowels - usually long. (For the more precise notation of vowel sounds in the Hebrew Bible, the alphabet is supplemented by pointing, a system of dots and dashes written above or below the letters, which was devised by Jewish scholars in Tiberias on Lake Galilee towards the end of the first millennium A.D. – or, in deference to Jews, C.E. [Common Era].) Every Hebrew verb has a root consisting of, usually, three consonants, around which the vowels dance in grammatically ordered patterns. Thus shamar and ra'ah mean respectively “he kept” (or "he protected") and “he saw”; the masculine singular participles shomer and ro'eh mean “keeping” (or “a guard” or "watchman") and “seeing” (or "a seer"), while yishmor and yir'eh are the same verbs, again in the masculine third person singular ("he..."), but with a more potential, often future meaning, such as “he shall keep” and “he shall see”. Instead of being integral to the verb root as in an Indo-European language, the vowels function as an indicator of what part and what mood of a verb you have in front of you. Meanwhile, with typical Hebraic economy, the triliteral consonantal roots are used for all they are worth in the formation of conceptually related verbs and substantives. So, as well as the verb “to keep”, the root sh-m-r gives us the derived passive verb nishmar, "he/it was kept", and such nouns as mishmar, “prison”, and shemurah, “eyelid” (because it protects the eye).
On the other hand, the compound words which have always been a major feature of Indo-European lexis are unknown to Hebrew; there is no counterpart, for instance, to the Homeric epithets “swift-footed”, “wine-dark” or “rosy-fingered” , let alone the boa-constrictor-like compounds that can occur in Sanskrit or German. An exception to this general absence of compounds is the large number of Hebrew personal names such as Daniel ("God is my judge") or Elijah ("Jah [Yahweh] is my God"). There is also the mysterious word, found in several places but most familiar from - again - Psalm 23, which literally means “shadow of death”.**
Beginning as the local language of one Semitic people among others in the ancient Near and Middle East, Hebrew eventually acquired its importance to Western - indeed, world - civilisation through the literature and culture of the Jewish diaspora and through its status as the original language of what Christians, but not Jews, call the Old Testament.*** Already by the time of Jesus, It had been displaced on its native soil by its sister Aramaic (whose alphabet it shares) as a language of everyday use; yet, following its great secular revival around the turn of the nineteenth century, it is of course today the primary language of the state of Israel. Besides that, it is a vehicle not only for the precepts of the Jewish religion but for an immensely rich body of narrative, myth, poetry and wisdom writing, and I myself find it an endlessly fascinating and rewarding study.
NOTES
* The Semitic languages were more numerous in the ancient world, where they included such long-extinct tongues as Assyrian, Ugaritic, and Punic, the language of Rome's great enemy Carthage (Kart-chadasht, "new city"). On the other hand, Aramaic, the language presumably spoken by Jesus and, before that, the lingua franca of the Achaemenid Persian empire, has survived in some isolated Middle Eastern communities, as well as in print in whole chapters of Daniel and Ezra and in the massive Talmud. Modern Semitic languages also include the interesting hybrid Maltese - basically a local form of Arabic, but with a large admixture of Italian, and the one Semitic language officially to use the roman alphabet.
** A more obviously curious feature of this favourite psalm – curious, that is, unless the words have grown too familiar to worry about – is verse 5a: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies”. As with the valley of the shadow of death that comes immediately before, one gets the message that God takes good care of the psalmist in the most threatening of situations, but the scene remains rather hard to envisage (some kind of picnic on a battlefield?); although the early-12th-century Spanish rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra does his best by equating the "table" with the green pastures of verse 2. It has been suggested (and not in connection with Israel’s nuclear armament programme) that shulchan, “table”, is here a scribal error, to be emended by the removal of a single pen-stroke to shelach, “weapon” or “missile”. This would give the meaning “You position in front of me a weapon aimed at my enemies”, which does seem to make better sense, even if many lovers of the psalm may regret the warlike note that it introduces and the disappearance of that inviting table.
*** The actual designation of the Hebrew Bible, as seen on the cover of any edition, is rather a mouthful: Torah, nevi'im u-kh'tuvim, i.e. Pentateuch, prophets and "writings" (all the various other books, from Psalms to Chronicles). In practice, Jews shorten this to an acronym, the Tanakh. The use of acronyms in Hebrew is not incompatible with reverence; another example is the Rambam, standing for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Moses Maimonides).
