Comments on: Learning Biblical Languages

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:43:20 +0000

Calvin, you are right about thinking in it. I learned Japanese in country first, then Greek and Hebrew. How you live in a second language determines how you approach the text of scripture. Academics can ruin your total comprehension of the flow of thought of the writer. You must develop your own style of entering this arena.

By: Calvin

Calvin — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:36:10 +0000

D&T – I may have spoken unclearly. I think that at times people tend to learn Hebrew with the expectation that grammatical exegesis will open all these amazing vistas onto the text. That’s often not the case. It is good to understand the grammar. But at times I think we over analyze the Biblical text from a grammatical stand point. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do grammatical exegesis, just that at times it seems to me we need to simple read what the text says and understand it at that level before delving into a grammatical analysis. Of course, to some extent non-native speakers do grammatical analysis while reading. But I digress.

Luke – I’d love to find that documentary. I agree that there is a difference between being a native speaker and learning a language later in life. There is plenty of research that indicates young children acquire languages more easily than adults. I think I’ve heard that story from Prof. Kline.

Adam – You’re making sense, and after a day of coding, what could be better than talking about Biblical languages? I agree with pretty much everything you said, and my point is really what you already mentioned; acheiving a certain amount of automaticity with classical Hebrew is a huge aid in being able to understand the written text.

D&T – Perhaps part of the issue is a difference in goals. I want people to learn Hebrew to read the text. I think you want this as well, but I think your more immediate goal is exegesis. Is that a fair assessment?

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:05:27 +0000

Just a couple of thoughts for you:
Communication is a fairly dynamic process. In the case of spoken language a speaker communicates with an audience, in some cases one person, in other cases there are multiple people in the audience. In the case of writing however, there is a writer and there is a reader. Now, hopefully nobody is going to deny that writing is a communicative effort and that the author is communicating with the reader, but to what extent is the reader communicating with the author? There might be some merit to differentiating between the communication of speech and the communicative act of writing and reading. Now, this does not preclude spoken communication as a means of building the necessary skills to understand written text. I think learning to speak a language is an excellent way to learn how to understand the written text. However, I would not necessarily say that the process works the other way around (learning to read first and speak second, you won’t be able to keep up). Finally, take all of this with a grain of salt. I’ve been programming all day, and these are only slightly developed thoughts.

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:12:10 +0000

For what it’s worth, I once saw a documentary about research in brain activity during speech acts (sorry, no source on this one—I think it was on TLC). One group was made up of native speakers, another of fluent, 2nd language speakers. The study showed that the two groups exhibited activity in different parts of the brain as they spoke. This seems to lend credence to D&T’s position that there is a fundamental/biological difference between childhood language acquisition and foreign language learning. But that is not the same thing as saying one can’t internalize (or learn to “think in”, if that is the same thing) a second language. I may be mistaken, but I take it that this distinction between the two processes is D&T’s point, not that a certain level of fluency can not be obtained in more than one language.
As for whether this is possible with a dead language— Calvin, ask prof. Kline sometime about his old teacher who dreamed in Akkadian!

By: danielandtonya

danielandtonya — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:58:37 +0000

So exegesis does not regualarly include grammatical and syntactic analysis? We don’t think grammatical understanding is a super-understanding of Scripture either. But it is necessary for us second language users. As well as big picture issues, which is being greatly advanced by text linguistics. I don’t see the correlation between grammatical analysis and modern application. Can you explain?

For confessional reasons, I don’t like the term “dead language”. And for linguistic reasons, I think it an imprecise term. You’re right, the cohelet project doesn’t aim at communication with dead people. But it teaches like you’d teach modern Hebrew. For me, that’s problematic. I like the idea of using it for vocab, but that’s about it. Why not just take modern Hebrew? I did. It made my biblical Hebrew better.

By: Calvin

Calvin — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:31:37 +0000

Daniel and Tonya, regarding exegesis I simply get nervous when we start talking about grammatical exegesis as some form of “super-understanding” for Scripture. I’d get nervous if someone did grammatical exegesis on a paper I wrote, and sometimes I think we focus too much on the minutia and miss out on the big picture. That isn’t to say knowing grammar isn’t important, I just think we need to step back sometimes and realize that a passage doesn’t necessarily have application to our 21st century context.

I agree that learning a dead language to communicate with native speakers is absurd. However, I’m not sure that the Cohelet project wants to have its students communicate with non-existent language speakers. Rather, they understand that all language is communicative, and learning it via an ulpan method is probably the best way to go as far as understanding what the language is communicating (which should really be the first goal of reading the Bible in Hebrew or Greek, only after that can we talk about exegesis).

By: danielandtonya

danielandtonya — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:01:35 +0000

Some quick responses:

What’s exegesis to you? Why do you think we disagree?

I should be more specific about specific kinds of communication. Of course reading and writing are communicative things humans do. What I meant was that the idea of learning biblical Hebrew or Koine to communicate with native speakers is absurd. My comments about communicating were largely in response to a presentation Adam and I saw at a NAPH session by the Cohelet project. It seeks to teach biblical Hebrew as if it would be used as a spoken language that has living native speakers. I find this erroneous. I should be more specific. Thanks for the catch. By the way, “automaticity” is Diana Pulido’s word. She’s the second language acquisition consultant for the cohelet project.

I like and agree with your assesment of sight reading: its a practical issue not a pedagogical one. We need to be able to do it so we don’t get frustrated all the time. I think we can be more precise as to how and when we make that a goal. Also, this is a place where we can use (and teach how to use) digital resources.

Great conversation.