“The language of God,” Biblical Hebrew. I’m off soon to teach our third week’s class, and we’re in the thick of it now. The alphabet (or aleph-bet) is kind of fun — little ditties, the novelty of recognizing letters completely different from what we see in English, of reading from right to left. But the rose is paling as we get into “weak roots” and the finicky needs of gutteral letters. Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, a.k.a. “Hebrew Bible,” because… ok, you get it… can be exasperating. So many rules that hardly qualify as rules for all their exceptions, shape-shifting letters, and other letters that simply disappear from the words you’ve laboriously memorized. But what a thrill to recognize the multi-layered nature of sacred text, to be able to unpack a single Hebrew word to yield a full sentence, to see the wordplay for oneself, and to contemplate the possibilities and limitations of translation. I hope the students catch that energy at least as often as they grimace at “compensatory lengthening” and “virtual doubling.”
