Introduction
Welcome to Hebrew 101: Biblical Hebrew for Seminarians!
This series is designed for seminarians learning introductory Biblical Hebrew.
If you’re interested in learning to speak in Hebrew, you’ll find that here. But note that there is a more academic purpose to this series.
Learning to speak another language like Hebrew is a worthy cause. However, our goal is to teach fellow seminarians to read the Old Testament in its original language in order to do Biblical exegesis.
In doing so, the student will be able to find the intended meaning of the original text and to discover its significance or relevance for one’s sermons or ministry.
Learning the Aleph-bet
In a previous post, we introduced you to Bnaiorpueblo’s 11-part series of video tutorials on learning the Hebrew alphabet. While your seminary may use slightly different pronunciations of the consonants and vowels, don’t worry about it. We’re all talking about the same thing and the skills this series will teach you will be easily transferable, whether you insist a certain character is read “vav” or “waw”.
The best way to learn any language is to be immersed in it. The attitude we will be taking in this series is think, speak, write, read Hebrew from day 1, refraining from using English as much as possible.
For example, note the Hebrew character at the top of this post. When you learn the character’s name and pronunciation, refrain from having to spell out the name of the character as “aleph” and that it’s pronounced with a long a-sound as in “ahh”. Instead our methods of learning will be like so:
- View and memorize what the character looks like.
- Listen to how it sounds in your head.
- Say it out loud.
- Write out the character.
- Repeat.
At the seminary level, you should have all of the consonants memorized in a day’s time.
For today’s lesson, we’ll have you learn the 22 consonants by heart, mind, hand, ear and soul:
- Watch and participate in the video lessons on learning the names and sounds for each of the 22 consonants here. (While vowel sounds are touched upon in the videos, we’ll be covering them more in-depth in the next lesson. Why? Vowels get actually more complicated than what’s shown in the video. So for now, just stick to learning the consonants.)
- After viewing the videos and learning how they sound, download these flash cards from the website Shalom-peace.com and quiz yourself on recognizing the characters’ names and corresponding sounds.
- Download this tutorial on how to write the Hebrew letters in “block” lettering, also found on the Shalom-peace.com website. As you write them, say the name of the character and its corresponding sound in your head. Block lettering is one of two methods of writing Hebrew by hand. The font used in the videos are normally found in printed form.
- An effective method that people learned Hebrew was through music and song. The method that we used to learn the alphabet was sung to the tune of “Frere Jacques”. It’s silly, but it works! Try writing the characters in block print, as you sing the Aleph-bet to the tune of “Frere Jacques”!
Go over the tips listed above and practice, practice, practice.
In our next lesson, we’ll be taking the next step and introduce vowels.
