Here are some tips for remembering vocabulary in Biblical Hebrew: Use flashcards: Write down new vocabulary on flashcards, including the Hebrew word, transliteration, and English translation. Review them regularly to help commit them to memory. Practice reading in context: Reading Biblical Hebrew in context can help you remember new vocabulary. Try reading passages from the Hebrew Bible and use a dictionary or online resource to look up unfamiliar words. (Daily Dose of Hebrew is an excellent resource for daily short readings of biblical Hebrew.) Study word roots: Many Hebrew words are based ..read more

In the attached video, Dr. Michael Brown tackles the idea addressed back in September here in the blog of Hebrew pictographs (pictograms). He does a very good job of covering the issue, so I thought I would share it here. Enjoy! The post More on Pictograms (from Dr. Michael Brown, YouTube) first appeared on The Hebrew Caf ..read more

Jonathan has been teaching a course in advanced biblical Hebrew recently, in which he is using two textbooks: (1) Gesenius’s Hebrew Grammar; and, (2) Jacob Weingreen’s Classical Hebrew Composition. In this video, I go through the whole of Text III from Weingreen’s textbook and explain why I render it the way that I do in biblical Hebrew. This complements what I wrote up about one of the verses from Text II on The Learners Forum (see here specifically). Let me know what you think and if you enjoy this. The post On Hebrew Composition first appeared on The Hebrew Caf ..read more

The second chapter of the book of Exodus overflows with textual oddities. By chance, Jonathan asked me to read it with him last night, and so we sat down on Zoom and read through it, stopping every once in a while to comment on some textual quirk that leapt off the page. I thought it would be worthwhile to write some of these down and get some feedback, if anyone else is interested. I’ll break it up by verses and comment where I think the text is less than clear. These really are just impressions that I get from the text. I haven’t checked any commentaries at this point beyond that of the St ..read more

And now, back to the basics! The following is a handout that I presented to my students in our last Hebrew 1 session (if you would like to purchase access to the recorded [unlisted] videos, contact me here). Reading Biblical Hebrew is a necessary component for efficient learning, and in order to do that, you need to know how to divide words into syllables, just like we did when we were learning English. Here are the principles used for syllabification/syllable division. Notes on Syllabification – For Reading! It is important that as we are learning to read Hebrew, we think in terms of phonet ..read more

Image: Ruth 1:1 (Masoretic Text) Above is the text of Ruth 1:1, as we look at the introduction to this fantastic book of the Hebrew Bible. In Jewish circles, people tend to call it Megillat Rut (מְגִלַּת רוּת), the “scroll of Ruth,” rather than the “book” of Ruth. This is because Ruth is written on a separate scroll that is publicly read during the holiday of Shavuot (חַג שָׁבוּעוֹת), just as Lamentations (אֵיכָה) is read during the night of Tisha Be’Av (ט׳ בְּאָב) to commemorate the two-time destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. For those who are interested in a linguistic treatment of th ..read more

While it may appear that the Hebrew Café is silent, there is actually quite a few things going on around here. Jonathan has been meeting with his students twice a week as they worked through beginning, intermediate, and advanced biblical Hebrew. The advanced course met most recently on Tuesdays and Thursdays as they worked through the first few sections of Jacob Weingreen’s Classical Hebrew Composition (Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 1957) and tackled some concepts related to the historical development of various forms in biblical Hebrew. Each of these classes was recorded and uploaded to YouTub ..read more

  Emerging from the Canaanite milieu of Semitic languages, Hebrew has been around for a very long time. It isn’t clear how old the language is, but most place its emergence in the early second millennium before the Common Era (just before 1,000 bce). The language was actually called at one point in the Bible “the language of Canaan” (שְׂפַת כְּנַ֫עַן; cf. Isaiah 19:18), and we see from inscriptions from the early period of the language that several other Canaanite languages (such as Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite) were very close to Hebrew in orthography (the alphabet that they used), in ..read more

I take the first step into this blog post with a bit of trepidation. I intend to broach a subject that Hebrew teachers generally avoid, given its controversial nature. In fact, one of Krashen’s hypotheses about the Natural Approach to second-language acquisition is that language teachers must do what they can to lower the “affective filter” (pp. 37–39), which would block students from connecting emotionally with the language and would discourage them from taking independent strides toward putting themselves into positions for receiving comprehensible input and discovering optimal input mater ..read more

As you might be aware, Jonathan has been writing a series about the word order of the biblical Hebrew verbal sentence. The significance of that series and what he is arguing might be lost, however. Therefore, I wanted to write a short entry to let you know why I have become a recent convert to Cook and Holmstedt’s proposal for the re-examination of the standard or “unmarked” word order in biblical Hebrew. Anyone who learned Hebrew through the standard channels will generally tell you that the normal word order in Hebrew is verb-subject-object (VSO). That is, the verb appears first, then the s ..read more