In my last three posts I told you the story of our foundational course, Hebrew Quest. One of the greatest strengths of that program was how I got my students reading the Hebrew Bible right after they learned the alphabet. There's nothing more thrilling than actually reading Hebrew for yourself and understanding some of it! This is our organic learning philosophy at Holy Language Institute, that the best way to learn your second language is the same way you learned your first - by hearing it. In this case, starting by reading along with your teacher and eventually taking off the training wheels and hearing the language in your own voice as you read it yourself. In Hebrew Quest this took the form of reading word by word through hundreds of verses and showing my students not just how to sound out the words, but how to figure out what they meant. To borrow the Chinese proverb, I didn't want to just give my students a Hebrew fish. I wanted to teach them how to fish for themselves!
Hebrew Quest definitely gave my students a good start in that direction but the question was, how could they keep growing after finishing the program? And how could we keep up the relationship? My answer was to start doing weekly video lessons called Hebrew Verses where we could get more quality time together reading verse by verse through Hebrew scriptures, just like we did in Hebrew Quest. First we read through Genesis and Matthew. Then my students voted we work through Romans. Wait a minute! Those two books are in the New Testament and that's in Greek, isn't it? Yes, although the answer isn't that simple. The early Church Fathers said that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew, and Eastern Christianity reads the Aramaic New Testament and claims it's the original. Whatever the case may be, we know that Yeshua and his disciples read the Bible and did the synagogue prayers in Hebrew, and so did Paul. So regardless of what the original language was, the authors of the New Testament all had a Hebraic mindset and its context is deeply Jewish. With this in mind, we did our readings from a translation from the Greek into Biblical Hebrew with a desire to get closer to Yeshua and understand Paul better, and we weren't disappointed!
This moment with my famous Hebrew letters coffeecup captures these lessons well. Hebrew Verses is like getting together with me to pray and read the Hebrew Bible over coffee. That sounds simple, but the prayerful study of Scripture is the biggest thing you can do to grow in your relationship with God and your understanding of Hebrew. It's what disciples do. So we read along verse by verse, with me showing you how to pronounce words and look them up, excitedly telling you what I'm getting out of the text, and making the occasional dumb joke. That's the short version of the story of Hebrew Verses. It's actually longer and more complicated but some of it bugs me so I didn't share it here. You can read the whole story and experience Hebrew Verses for yourself at https://holylanguage.com/verses and tell me what you think.