In a comment at Seumas’ blog, Karyn asked all of us to slow the pedagogical train down and re-evaluate content of our biblical language instruction. While we haven’t created the kind of introductory grammar Karyn is envisioning, tailored to an audience and their goals, we have created a syllabus for such an audience. Here is a hypothetical, stripped-down, 20 week introduction to biblical Hebrew. This is not necessarily the best way to teach the literary language. But it works with specific audience and their abilities.
This hypothetical Hebrew class is offered through and meets at a hypothetical, local Baptist church. All the hypothetical students are members or attenders of the church. They all have hypothetical jobs, hypothetical families, and many other hypothetical obligations. The class will meet for two hypothetical hours in the evening once per week for twenty weeks.
On day one, ten students show up for class. In a few weeks, only four of these people will still be coming.
Everyone meets each other and the students discuss why they want to learn biblical Hebrew including what they specifically want to be able to do with their knowledge. Most people say that they want to be able to read the Bible in the original. Some say they want to be able to translate for themselves instead of relying on published translations. One person says she wants to be able to read the scholarly commentaries that puzzle her. One other hypothetical student says his work sometimes takes him through Palestine so he want to learn Hebrew (and Arabic) and he heard of a free class, but yea reading the Bible’s important too.
The teacher asks, “Would you agree with the statement- As a Christian, being able to interpret the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament is important to me-?” The hypothetical Christians agree.
The hypothetical teacher passes out a syllabus with a list of tools on it. Each section title corresponds to a chapter in BBH.
Tools
BHS
BBH-Textbook
BBH-Workbook
Holladay’s Concise Hebrew Lexicon
William’s Hebrew Syntax, 3rd ed
*HALOT – recommended
*Waltke-O’Connor – recommended
Syllabus Week-by-Week
1 – Alef-Bet
2 – Vowels and Syllabification
3 – Nouns, Article ה, Conjunction ו
4 – Prepositions, Adjectives
5 – Pronouns, Pronominal Suffixes
6 – Construct Chain and Review
7 – Intro to Verbs
8 – Qal Perfect Strong
9 – Qal Imperfect Strong
10 – Vav Consecutive/Vayyiqtol and Pronominal Suffixes on Verbs
11 – Qal Volitional Verbs (Cohortative, Imperative, Jussive)
12 – Qal Infinitives
13 – Qal Participle
14 – Jonah 1.1 (היה, intro to syntax specifically apposition, formulas)
15 – Jonah 1.2 (intro to weak verbs, more apposition, functions of כי)
16 – Jonah 1.3 (weak verbs and syntax)
17 – Jonah 1.4 (Hifil and Nifal stems, syntax)
18 – Jonah 1.5 (weak verbs and syntax)
19 – Jonah 1.6 (Hitpael stem and syntax)
20 – Jonah 1.7 (syntax)
The teacher then presents the hypothetical class with the real Hebrew Alef-Bet. The teacher tells the class to practice in their workbook and have the Alef-Bet memorized by the next week. Dismissed. The teacher catches the guy who goes to the Levant for business at the door and gives him the number of a Rabbi friend at the local JCC and tells him of programs there that might be better suited for his purposes.
The next week, only seven show up. Five have the Alef-Bet down easy. One struggles. The other doesn’t pretend to have tried. The teacher presents vowels and syllabification. Now the class is vocalizing. They are told to practice vocalizing the vocab at the end of each chapter as they learn it. Workbook homework is given and the class is reminded that the homework is for their benefit and will only be checked if they have a question regarding a problem. The class is also told to not bother with many exercises in the BBH Workbook as they waste time. Dismissed.
The next week, the same seven show. Five know how to syllabify. Two don’t. “Why not?” asks the teacher. “No time,” they say. The teacher presents nouns, the article ה, and the conjunction ו. Homework is given. Dismissed.
The fourth week, only the five who’ve been studying show. Some questions from homework are asked and answered. The teacher briefly reviews then presents the day’s material. During class, the teacher notices that while the students don’t remember all the information all the time, they do know where to quickly find it in their textbook. Homework is assigned and the teacher asks the students to a few of their vocab words in their lexicon. Dismissed.
The next week, five confused students walk in have questions about how to use the lexicon. The queries are answered and the students feel a bit more comfortable with the strange book. The day’s material is taught. Homework assigned. Class dismissed.
Week six, only four show up and the teacher is told that the missing student had a family emergency. Material taught. Homework allotted. Go home.
The next week, the missing student sends another message, this time saying she has to quit. The four still attending ask questions from the homework, but before the teacher can answer, one of the other three does citing the textbook. While, the material is new for them and they have to look everything up in the textbook or lexicon, they’re getting quick at flipping pages and becoming familiar with their tools. Verbs are introduced. No new homework. Dismissed.
The next six weeks are spent going through strong verb paradigms. The teacher reminds the students that they only need to memorize the Qal Perfect and Imperfect strong verb paradigms and from those they’ll be able to identify any verb based on how it differs or adheres to the paradigms. The students ask why they’re skipping so many chapters in the textbook. The teacher thinks because you already know how to use it so go read those chapters on your own time, but answers, “So we can get to reading the Bible faster,” which is also true. Any fuller answer would waste valuable time on an issue of secondary importance. In fact, the teacher often has to deflect questions during class time, or just outright say we don’t have time for that. With two hours a week for twenty weeks, all the class has time for is learning how to use their materials more efficiently. No time for theology talk or pedagogical explanations. There’s only 40 hours of class time. It must be used wisely.
Weeks continue in this fashion.
Week 14 finally hits and the class opens their BHS to the book of Jonah. The class is scheduled to discuss one verse per week, but that means everyone will have to come prepared, which is kind of impossible if you haven’t learned all the material yet. Instead of hurrying to finish each verse, the teacher surrenders to the fact that this class time is for grammatical and syntactic instruction and not for Bible reading. So its okay to not finish.
Each week during this pseudo-reading class, the students now switch to a kind of inductive learning. They’ve been presented with select information about Hebrew grammar. They’ve learned some vocab. And they can use their baby grammar and baby lexicon with ease. They will now use these abilities to slowly study the text and teach themselves what they have not yet learned. The class is told that now class time will consist of vocalizations of the verse being read and discussion about the verse’s grammar and syntax.
The hypothetical teacher passes out hypothetical “cheat sheets”, which are parsings of the text. The teacher printed them from Accordance. The students are told to use the cheat sheets when having difficulty parsing and when double-checking their work, and they ought not feel bad about doing so. There are forms in the text of Jonah that they can’t yet recognize. So when the students read a hifil verb in v4 and can’t identify it, they look at the cheat sheet. The cheat sheet tells them what the verb is, a hifil, and the students are then to look up the hifil chapter in their textbook, read the material, and apply it to the verse. They won’t have memorized the hifil stem, but they will know how to use their tools to figure out problems. Once they figured out enough hifil problems, the hifil stem will become easily recognizable and stick in their head. This method applies to all new grammatical and syntactic issues that arise in the text.
When need be, as is the case with weak and irregular verbs, the inductive study stops and a mini-lecture is given explaining how, II-ו hollow verbs for example, inflect. Once the students are comfortable with the material, the class moves on.
On week 20, the class is over, but there’s still more text in Jonah. Chances are, if the students have come this far, they’ll go farther. And as the reason for their study is confessional, they’ll keep studying and learning as part of their confession. So, the class is told that they’ll take a break for a few weeks, but they are invited back to begin a reading course wherein they’ll continue grammatical and syntactic (heavy on the syntactic part) discussions of Jonah. The future class will take place in the same space at the same time.
Four students have now been taught how to use basic tools that will change the way they study Scripture. Study Bibles with fluff notes and bad sermons on tape will no longer satisfy these four. They’ve been equipped with tools that answer different kinds of questions that they are learning to ask for themselves.
i can remember going through some of this. especially the family emergency
Thanks for posting this. Sorry I missed it earlier (been off the grid quite a bit the past week). I’m writing a longer response to Seumas and the discussion that we’ve had on his blog post for my own blog. I should finish in the next day or so. I’ll save my comments about what you’ve done here for that post. Bottom line: I like a lot of what you are trying to do.
Thanks.
As of now, the only serious change we’ve made to content has been with a chainsaw. We’ve stripped away anything that can be saved for a later reading course.
We anxiously await your words.