How to learn Biblical Hebrew

[liv]

I've been thinking a lot about learning Hebrew as an adult, because it turns out lots of people in my circle are attempting this, in addition to the people who are actually in my classes. I thought I might write down some guidelines here, with the faint intention of one day turning this into a textbook, or at least a guide I can refer to when more people ask me similar questions.

Who learns Biblical Hebrew? Anyone who's curious, of course, but in reality it's usually either people who are converting to (or reconnecting with) Judaism, or people studying Christian theology at an advanced level, usually training for ministry.

How to get started? I massively, massively recommend putting some time in drilling the alef-bet (alphabet). This especially goes if you've never previously learned a language which doesn't use the Latin alphabet, and even if you have Greek or Russian, Hebrew is a lot harder to bluff your way through than those. If you can't read quickly enough to hold whole words in working memory, it becomes a massive barrier to ever progressing other elements of your language skills. And based on my experience there is no shortcut to this, you just have to put in repeated practice until you can associate letters with sounds without conscious thought. You can use traditional or electronic flashcards (the Anki app isn't bad), or you can use something with a bit more gamification like Memrise. Duolingo has a somewhat sensible set of lessons on the alef-bet (which used not to be the case as they mixed in reading fluency with vocabulary), but it's slightly fiddly to get at them, the process is something like, try to test out of the earlier lessons, fail the test, get sent to the remedial track which actually teaches the letters. Some people find writing / tracing the letters helps, others just find it frustrating, and if you're trying to learn on your own, there isn't to my knowledge a good app supporting this kind of practice.

So how does the Hebrew alef-bet work? Hebrew is mostly an abjad, that is, it primarily has letter-like symbols representing the consonants, with vowel markings being an optional extra (and in fact developed much later historically). The consonants don't give you a fully phonetic mapping to possible sounds, but it's a lot closer to that than English. There are 24 consonant letters in the alef-bet, with a canonical alphabetical order. Of these, 3-6 (depending on dialect) have exactly two alternative pronunciations and there are five pairs where two different letters are pronounced mostly the same. But there are no digraphs, there are minimal changes in pronunciation depending on adjacent letters. If you learn it as symbol = phoneme for each of the 24, you're 90% of the way there. Also, 5 letters change shape when they're at the end of the word, known as final letters.

What about the vowels? If the vowel markings are present, they are small, punctuation-like marks which appear above, below or sometimes inside the consonant letters. To pronounce them you nearly always pronounce the consonant first, then the vowel associated with it (there is one exception). If vowel markings are absent then spelling, grammar and context give you some hints how to pronounce the words, but sometimes the only reason why it's this rather than that is tradition and you just have to learn it. This sounds a bit weird but f wrt nglsh wtht vwls y cn prbbly mk rsnbl gss wht 'm syng.

Do the vowels matter, then? There are two ways for beginners to approach a language that is an abjad with some vowel-markings tacked on later. One is to mostly ignore the vowels, and eventually you build up enough experience to manage without them. This is the way that modern Israeli Hebrew is typically taught, and the majority of Hebrew texts out there in the world don't have vowel markings, so learning to do without is useful eventually. However, the main exception is exactly the texts that classical Hebrew beginners are usually interested in: printed Hebrew Bibles that academic / vocation-based Christians are likely to be studying, and prayer books used regularly in synagogue services. Therefore I usually recommend investing a bit of time and effort into learning the vowels as well as the consonants, which is partly about retraining your brain to pay attention to stuff that looks like skippable minor punctuation and diacritics.

How does Hebrew work as a language? The most notable feature of Hebrew which makes it strange to people used to European languages is that most words are based on three letter roots. Not only can you change these by way of conjugations, but you'll have clusters of related nouns, verbs, adjectives all based on the same set of three letters. This is cool, because it sometimes means you can guess the meaning of a new word without having to break it down into component parts. So the words for 'book' and 'number' and 'writer' are related to the words for 'tell' and 'count', the words for 'key' and 'entrance' are related to the root 'open', and so on. But it can also be awkward when it comes to looking things up in dictionaries, because if you accidentally look up a prefix letter instead of the main word you might not find the target. It's good to explicitly train yourself in the skill of spotting the root of a word.

Word order is usually V(erb)S(ubject)O(bject), adjectives usually follow nouns, and most words have grammatical gender. Pronouns exist but a lot of the time the subject and object of a verb are expressed as conjugation markers plus suffixes, rather than with separate pronouns.

How to learn independently? Hebrew is quite difficult to learn completely on your own and completely from books, especially due to the barrier of getting your head round the writing system. If you're training to be a Christian minister presumably your college or seminary will have some kind of classes, if you're interested in becoming Jewish then come along to a synagogue and at least have a go at following along with the service and getting your ear familiar with the sounds. You probably want to be doing this anyway if you're learning Hebrew for religious reasons as well as purely from linguistic interest.

That said, a big advantage of Hebrew being mainly a religious language is that there are a lot of parallel texts out there, so you can look at a Bible where you may be familiar with the material, and see how the Hebrew matches up with the translation. Similarly most prayerbooks these days published outside Israel provide parallel texts, and some even offer Hebrew transliteration (sounds written in Latin letters).

What books are recommended? There is a real gap in textbooks written for adult beginners, there are academic texts intended for advanced degrees, and there are any number of books for young kids. But not much in the way of an introductory book that explains grammatical concepts and introduces core vocabulary. This gap partly why I'm considering writing these thoughts into a textbook. I often end up recommending J Weingreen: A practical grammar for classical Hebrew which is however more than 80 years old and written in a somewhat intimidating style.

What about web resources? There's a lot of reasonably decent reference material on Wikipedia, including searchable grammar tables. Obviously it's not laid out in a particularly educational way, and often goes into too much detail, but it's quite useful for looking up concepts and finding examples. There are any number of resources, more than I can even sift, for teaching you the alef-bet, but not much that I've found that goes on to the next stage usefully.

If you are at all interested in religious texts you want Sefaria, which has core texts like the Bible in multiple translations, and at least one good translation of major Rabbinic works including the Talmud itself. I wouldn't try to learn the Talmud when you are a beginner at Hebrew, especially since three quarters of it is in a related language, Aramaic, anyway. But it's an indication of how awesome Sefaria is that they have made a complete, scholarly translation available completely free. And you can highlight any word to get a dictionary lookup, and switch on and off parallel texts, and it's a really excellent resource but probably isn't going to teach you the Hebrew language from first principles.

What is to be avoided? There is a lot of very bad material out there purporting to teach Hebrew. Christian resources are not a problem, especially for people who are learning Hebrew for religious Christian reasons anyway. But websites / video channels / materials designed by so-called Messianic Jews (such as Jews for Jesus) that are designed to bait Jewish readers into Christian cults are really dodgy. Some of them teach correct-ish Hebrew language but couched in a deceitful context, a lot don't even bother with accuracy and just dump a load of cult propaganda in guise of Hebrew tutorials.

The big big red flag is a lot of woo. I mean, yes, there are words and concepts in Hebrew that are difficult to translate, as is the case with any foreign language and especially an ancient one. But if you read stuff that tells you that this word doesn't just mean "peace", it means something completely ineffable and impossible to express in any language without spiritual insight from God directly, then it's not really trying to teach Hebrew as a language, it's at best homiletics. You occasionally get woo from the neo-Pagan side, eg stuff that's purporting to be kabbalah (Jewish mystical thought), mostly it's bad Jewish theology or Christian theology whose merits I'm not in a place to judge, but if you're actually trying to learn the language it's anti-helpful.

Is modern Hebrew useful? I mean, it's not un-useful. Hebrew is a revived language so the contemporary language spoken in Israel is definitely mutually comprehensible with classical Hebrew, it's much closer than say modern Greek and classical Greek, or modern English and Old English or even Middle English. The big advantage of modern Hebrew is that there is a wealth of resources for learners of all levels, though much of it is politically Zionist so it's worth being aware if that bothers you. For some people it's helpful to have stuff to listen to and vocabulary to be able to express yourself in simple sentences and generally use your modern language skills. The Duolingo course on modern Hebrew is not bad if you like Duo. And you can get quite a long way as a beginner before you run into any significant differences in grammar.

If you are or have been in this position of an adult Hebrew learner, what else do you need to know?

Comments

[independence1776]

I've learned the alef-bet; my synagogue offers every summer a five or six week class called "The Hebrew Reading Crash Course." The class and material is from NJOP.org and that site does have an interactive alef-bet, though I can't get it to work. My synagogue also offered a class called "Prayerbook Hebrew for Adults" (with a textbook-workbook of the same name by behrmanhouse.com (which has other adult-focused texts but I don't know how good they are) but it mostly focused on learning vocabulary with some grammatical concepts and they stopped offering it years before the pandemic. That is as far as my Hebrew ever got and I do feel inadequate about it, but haven't ever figured out how or where to learn more. So I guess that's what I personally need: the next step(s) after learning the alef-bet, especially ones that aren't "use Duolingo."

[liv]

This is exactly the problem. There's a wealth of resources out there for learning the alef-bet. But very little else until you get to advanced degree or serious yeshiva level, and there's such a yawning gap in between. This is the gap I'm trying to fill and I'm getting quite concerned that the only way to make it work is to write the textbook I wish existed.

Thanks for pointing out NJOP to me, that looks like it might have some resources I could make use of. Berhman House have a lot of really good material for children / teens, though it tends to be pretty expensive to import to Europe. So I should definitely have a look at what they offer for adults.

The class your synagogue used to offer sounds like a good start and I'm doing something similar. The best answer I have to 'what next after the alef-bet' is 'regularly attend synagogue services'. However, the pandemic makes that a lot more challenging of a proposition, and there is the major downside that if you're trying to learn Hebrew you're not fully concentrating on the actual prayer. And I know lots of people actually need teaching, not simply being around lots of Hebrew recited at pace by congregations who are very familiar with it.

If you would like to join my Zoom class, I can PM you details. I would completely understand if the timezones and/or the prospect of crossing the streams between DW and offline identities doesn't work for you. But what I'm doing, FWIW, is reading through common prayers really slowly, making sure to allow time for people who are still working on whole-word fluency even if they mostly know the alef-bet, and discussing grammatical features in detail.

Regarding independent learning, what I would suggest for you is take a familiar text (Torah or Siddur or something like that) and pick through it word by word, even if at the start you have to look up everything in the dictionary, you'll start to get familiar. For example, try Genesis ch 11, which is the story of the tower of Babel. Nine verses, mostly simple and quite repetitive vocabulary. To get the decoding (matching print to sounds), try reading it aloud to yourself. You can click on the dot beside the verse and a menu will open up, and somewhere in this menu is an option with a little speaker symbol labelled 'Torah readings'. This will play an audio recording of the verse being chanted. If it were being read without a melody and a bit slower that would be better, but at least you can get a sense of how the letters fit together to make words.

Then, for meaning and vocabulary, see if there are any words you know from other contexts. You might, for example, recognize הָאָרֶץ meaning 'the earth' from the blessing for bread or אֶחָד meaning 'one' from the Shema. This could help you to match the Hebrew to the English translation; I recommend the Schocken Bible of the options on Sefaria since it's fairly literal. To see the 'answers', you can highlight each word and the site will open up a dictionary entry for you. You'll see the same word coming up lots of times and this will help you to build up vocab.

[independence1776]

Writing your own textbook sounds like an awful lot of work.

You're welcome. I hope they're of some use to you.

The best answer I have to 'what next after the alef-bet' is 'regularly attend synagogue services'. [...] And I know lots of people actually need teaching, not simply being around lots of Hebrew recited at pace by congregations who are very familiar with it.

I will attest to that. I can probably count on two hands the number of Shabbat morning services I've missed since I converted. The only thing I'm able to do now that I wasn't when I started is being able to find the place in the Torah readings if I lose track of what's being chanted because I'm reading commentary. I pretty much never lose track in the siddur itself. But I don't know sometimes if I'm truly reading the siddur or just following along to memorization.

I am in theory interested in your class; it sounds exactly like what I've wanted. I'd be okay with crossing the streams, but the timezones are a killer. I started a new job a couple of weeks ago and I'm still exhausted. I very much appreciate your offer.

Thank you for your independent learning suggestions. Those I'll try out when I regain some energy.

[lethargic_man]

To pronounce them you nearly always pronounce the consonant first, then the vowel associated with it (there is one exception).

If you're referring to furtive פתח, this actually applies to all four gutturals. This is not very well known, which is why you get a lot of people mispronouncing אֱלוֹהַ, which is just about the only example not involving ח which makes a difference in Israeli pronunciation, but of course if you're talking about Biblical Hebrew you should at least be aware that ע was historically pronounced, and still is by some communities.

[liv]

Fair point; I was intending to allude to the existence of this rule rather than explaining it in detail, because this is a 'how to get started learning' post rather than an actual tutorial. Although it makes sense I didn't know the furtive patach rule applied to ayin as well; I think I wouldn't actually be able to pronounce ayin + patach any different from patach + ayin, but it's useful to see how the pattern extends.

[lethargic_man]

If you think about the communities which pronounce ע as [ŋ] (like in English "singer"), the difference should become obvious.

[hatam_soferet]

I think it really depends what you want to use it for, and then targeting your practice time accordingly. Once you've got the alef-bet and about half of Weingreen down (nobody needs to know all the ins and outs of why grammar does what it does straight off the bat), it's all about pick your desired decoding media and do a hell of a lot of reading.

Because of biblical Hebrew and rabbinic Hebrew and Israeli Hebrew being entirely different animals, it's as well to be clear about what you're trying to learn, rather than lumping everything under "Hebrew" and then getting frustrated when a course doesn't do the job.

[liv]

You are definitely right, and a lot of the problem is indeed trying to bootstrap Biblical Hebrew from more readily available but not entirely relevant Israeli Hebrew courses. My feeling is that beginners generally aren't trying to learn Rabbinic Hebrew as such, though some liturgical Hebrew is closer to Rabbinic than Biblical. Lots lots lots of reading is definitely the right answer. I'm mostly fretting about trying to get people to the stage where lots of reading is viable. Alef-bet plus Weingreen is more or less how I did it, but I also had the advantage of attending cheder and services during my childhood language sponge phase.

[hatam_soferet]

I think I meant "reading" rather than reading. Decoding chunks of Tanakh. It's how I think we should use שנים מקרא אחד תרגום --once over as simple phonetic and grammatical decoding, once over for content comprehension, once over for content in a fluent language. Parsha classes are all about the third. Your early reading group does the first two and it's the right direction.

Have you used Linda Motzkin's textbook? I think she had a similar "dammit I have to write the textbook" thing.

[ewt]

I think there are some Torah readings on Librivox which I used to follow along with sometimes and found helpful. (I don't have a link to hand.) My preferred listening practice method was using an interlinear text and covering up the English the first time, then listening with the English uncovered, then covering the English again.

I learned a surprising amount from singing Hebrew language choral music, which is notationally difficult (either the syllables have to go in the wrong order or the music has to be printed right to left; I can deal with either (RtL is harder but I can do it), but most western musicians only learn to read music left to right), but this is probably not available to most people and was probably a function of repetition more than anything else.

I've never really gotten past beginner level, but I feel like I've been *about* to get further than that several times.

[liv]

This is a good point, there are audio recordings out there, at least for Torah. I haven't found many that are read rather than chanted, but the availability of resources is much greater now than even a few years ago. You have a music teacher's instinct for the sort of component skills practice which is most useful, I should think about making explicit how to do that, but definitely would recommend the sort of thing you're describing of using additional aids and guides and sometimes covering them up.

I have a whole other frustration about Hebrew language choral music. In particular one of my communities has an MD who is a professional musician but isn't Jewish, and a bunch of older Jewish folk who dimly remember melodies from childhood but have no formal musical training, and they're trying to teach eachother enough to piece together a service, and the lack of easily usable musical notation for Hebrew is a huge barrier. That's an extreme case, but even me trying to transmit melodies to my much more musically competent partners is running into this problem. The duct-tape-and-spit solution is to score music with the words written in transliteration, which is just about ok for learning tunes but obviously useless for learning to read Hebrew. I'm completely the wrong person to fix this; I can read music more or less but I definitely can't write down tunes or even really confidently judge whether someone's attempt at doing so is right. I think Christian choirs can have this a little bit too, in that some MDs will try to teach without using musical notation in order to avoid excluding people who can't read music, but not having the option of using dots at all is just *throws up hands*.

[ewt]

Trying to teach music without any notation is like trying to teach someone a poem without writing down the words: it's doable, but it takes a lot of work.

Thinking of it, at least some of the music I sang in the Zemel choir was in fact transliterated rather than having the Hebrew syllables printed underneath. But I definitely also remember singing pieces where all we had was the music and the (somewhat mangled) Hebrew, and how much that pushed me to learn more of the Hebrew.

One skill I never really made a start on was writing Hebrew, and I think for me that would also have been helpful. I still do a lot of writing longhand rather than typing, and all my music first drafts are with pencil and paper too. But I wasn't going to write on Shabbat and I didn't have a good enough learning routine to do it during the rest of the week.

[simont]

I'm not actually attempting to learn Hebrew, but as I read this FAQ, a question did spring to mind:

Wait, there are no vowels? Then what's that "alef" doing at the start of the alphabet?

As a mathematician, א is the most common Hebrew letter I encounter by a long way. (I have encountered ב on rare occasions, and nothing else that I can recall.) And it certainly sounds from the name as if it's a vowel – the natural supposition is that "alef-bet" is cognate with "alpha-bet", which in turn is cognate with αβ. So one expects א to be much like α.

It's clearly More Complicated Than That™, but what's going on there?

[hatam_soferet]

Alef is the most annoying letter to start the alef-bet with. It isn't a proper consonant, it's impossible to write nicely, it doesn't follow any of the rules.

[cjwatson]

Think of it as a silent letter that you can attach a vowel to; this can represent something like a hiatus between vowels. (This is not 100% accurate, especially across dialects, and proper Hebrew speakers will probably correct me, but I think it's OK as a working approximation.)

As I understand it, α was derived from א, but somewhere along the way it got reinterpreted as a vowel rather than as the onset of a vowel.

[liv]

This is a great question, because it really sheds light on the evolution of the alphabet! Classical Hebrew was an abjad. But sometimes you needed to notate a syllable that begins with a vowel. Alef does that job: it allows writing a syllable that begins with a vowel when the usual rule is that vowels (which you just know) follow consonants (which are written down). But it could be absolutely any vowel so it's not like alpha or A. You're quite right that alef-bet and alpha-bet are direct cognates.

What happened is that by the time the Greek alphabet evolved, they had the concept of letters to represent vowels, not just consonants. So Hebrew aleph (note it used to look like this: 𐤀 ) became Greek alpha α, which eventually evolved into Roman a. Both alpha and a are strictly vowels, they always represent the sound 'a' (except in English which went through a great vowel shift and messed up our spelling).

[simont]

Thank you!

This was one of those moments where you suddenly realise you should have been confused all along. Of course this wasn't the first time I'd heard that the vowels aren't written down in Hebrew. But I managed to hold that fact, and my vague supposition that alef was a vowel because all these alphabets start A B, in my head for decades without them ever getting close enough together to make me realise they contradicted each other :-)

[naath]

I appear to be suceeding at learning to read japanese (on duo) by looking at words and hearing them at the same time (still bad, can't watch utena yet)

[liv]

This is a very good idea. I suspect an ideal system would give people some way of hearing the sounds as well as looking at print, which might mean my "textbook" needs to be multimedia. What I don't like is Hebrew methods that require you to read a lot of nonsense words, whereas real words can be a bit complicated for a beginner to see the relationship between written word and sounds. Single letter-vowel pairs is ok, whole words which never appear in Hebrew but are just random syllables is a bad idea, IMO.

[naath]

seems to need real words...

[rosefox]

Thank you, this is exactly the sort of thing I would want as an adult who's interested in learning Hebrew for religious reasons. Modern Hebrew lessons assume I'm going to Israel on business or something.

There are aleph-bet Anki files here that I tried to use and couldn't make heads or tails of. I think something about the design of the Anki app just did not work for me.

What I want is the Hebrew equivalent of Wanikani and Textfugu for Japanese. Wanikani is a custom SRS system that's really nicely designed and fun, and Textfugu is "Japanese the hard way" with an excellent in-depth approach to understanding the structure of the language. So count me as a vote for you writing your own textbook.

[liv]

My goodness, if even you, in one of the most densely populated Jewish areas, can't find this kind of teaching, there really is a gap! I assumed it was mostly a problem of being out in the sticks of northern Europe. But yes, I'm annoyed with even having to learn modern Hebrew, it's only tangentially relevant and I don't at all want to go on a business trip, let alone make aliyah, which is what lots of the resources assume. Also, I would like to read way fewer beginners' texts about how a brave heroic soldier was tragically killed by evil terrorists after the State of Israel passively "appeared" in the ancient Jewish Holy Land...

The Anki deck you link is way too detailed IMO. It might be that Anki as a method doesn't work for you, which is one thing, but that deck is trying to be too thorough and teach you all possible variations of the letters, whereas if I were trying to help a beginner I would just start with the 24+5 basic letter forms. Memrise is a lot less good than it used to be but might work somewhat better for you, I'll dig out some links when I'm at my computer with my Hebrew learning bookmarks.

The Japanese resources you mention sound great. I suspect I'm going to end up having to learn coding to be able to make the resource I want, not just write a traditional print textbook.

[rosefox]

I asked my rabbi about it once and she recommended a community member who might be willing to personally give me lessons. But I prefer to study on my own, so I haven't looked into local resources.

I know SRS does work for me because I love Wanikani and did it for years. But it's true that I don't love the Anki interface.

Maybe there are coders you could work with, rather than having to learn a whole new skill? Though learning to code can be very fun.

[yrieithydd]

Weingreen is what we used in the class I did about 15 years ago. Sadly I didn't maintain it beyond that year and have basically forgotten everything beginning with the the alef-bet. Would love to get back to it properly.

[liv]

I like Weingreen a lot. He has a real talent for explaining grammatical rules from first principles and most importantly coming up with examples that actually illustrate the rules, and although somewhat artificial, are reasonably close to real Biblical language. But the book from the 1930s is very dry, and I follow Alice on this one, What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?

[wildeabandon]

Thank you for writing this. I am bookmarking it to come back to when I'm a bit further along with my Greek.

I've got a copy of Lambdin's Introduction to Biblical Hebrew, (because it's used for the first year course at Cambridge, which is less relevant than it was, but still seems like a reasonable place to start.) Do you have a view on how it compares with Weingreen?

if you're interested in becoming Jewish then come along to a synagogue and at least have a go at following along with the service and getting your ear familiar with the sounds.

I assume it would be completely inappropriate for me to do this as someone who isn't considering conversion?

[liv]

I don't know the Lambdin. I will check it out and see if it gives me some ideas or even is a useful reference for things I sort of half know like advanced conjugations. I've generally turned down university level textbooks because they're just too much for most people trying to get their heads round enough language to follow the prayers. Particularly because they are almost by definition designed to support taught courses which may make them less useful for independent study.

You would be most welcome to come to synagogue. We like Christian visitors who are sincere about learning more about how things work. If we can make the geography work I can arrange to invite you as my guest, which is always acceptable. But I don't think it would be a very good idea, or a very efficient use of your time, to show up regularly enough to give you a serious boost in your language learning. Not inappropriate, just that attending services is only indirectly useful and it's a big time commitment if you're not actually intending to draw closer to the community.

[princessofgeeks]

I came back to this after seeing you link to it in your year roundup... fascinating, thank you. I am not learning Hebrew but am fascinated by languages in general.

(The only language I ever studied in depth was Russian.)