Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl M. Bunday" <kmbunday AT ms29.hinet.net>]

Hi, everybody, just joined the list after E-mailed advice from a
person who saw a USENET post of mine asking the questions below:

What would you recommend as resources for teaching Chinese-speaking
seminary students a basic course in Biblical Hebrew, with Mandarin to
be the medium of instruction? What resources should I have as
reference tools for answering questions from students?

More than twenty years after my own classroom study of Biblical
Hebrew, I have the chance to pass on Hebrew lore to some people in
Taiwan. A friend of one of the members of the board of directors for
the church organization I work for in Taiwan told the director about a
seminary here that is looking for an instructor of Biblical Hebrew.
The board appears agreeable to approving my being seconded over to
that seminary to do the teaching, while I keep up my schedule of
miscellaneous church work for my current organization. So I have
already spoken to the seminary's dean to find out what the Hebrew
teaching job would involve.

The seminary dean is a medical doctor with a Ph.D. in pathology from
Taiwan's most illustrious university, who later obtained a degree in
theology at a United States seminary. He remembers Hebrew as a very
difficult subject and does not feel competent to teach it himself. He
says that Chinese seminary students call Hebrew (XIBOLAI WEN in
Chinese) by the term "XUEBULAI WEN," which means "the language that
can't be learned."

I have quite an enthusiasm for languages, and have taught Chinese to
English speakers and English to Chinese speakers in various
circumstances, but I have never taught Hebrew to anyone. Since I took
the University of Minnesota's first-ever Biblical Hebrew course back
in 1978, I've tried to keep up my Hebrew by reading the Bible in the
original (which I did cover-to-cover a few years later) and by reading
various monographs about Hebrew at the University of Minnesota and
Luther Seminary libraries in Minnesota, or at the China Evangelical
Seminary Library in Taipei. But I've never taught Hebrew to anyone,
and I've never taught about a non-Indo-European language in Chinese,
especially not about a language that is also non-Sinitic.

All students in a Taiwan seminary will have had foreign language study
experience, consisting at a minimum of study of English in compulsory
schooling throughout their secondary school years, and for most of
them the compulsory learning of Mandarin when they began schooling, as
Mandarin is the only language of instruction in Taiwan, even though
most people in Taiwan grow up in non-Mandarin-speaking homes. The
seminary dean tells me that some of the seminary students are high
school graduates, that is, not college graduates, and that all are
busy with ministry projects during their studies. So he recommends
keeping the course simple and basic. He proposes teaching the course,
which begins in September, for two credits, implying a schedule of
meeting one class session of two hours per week, continuing the course
through two semesters of sixteen weeks each. That makes a total of
sixty-four classroom contact hours--surely fewer than I had in my
Biblical Hebrew course some years ago. It would be better for the
learning process to have more class sessions per week, by the
conventional wisdom of language teaching, but that fits neither the
students' schedule nor mine. The students might number from fifteen to
twenty for this first-ever Hebrew class at this new seminary, which
counts as a "small class size" in Taiwan. The hope is that the
students, who are part of a denomination with very active
church-planting, will be able to use reference books about Biblical
Hebrew to answer practically oriented questions about Biblical
theology after they enter pastoral work. It is not expected that any
of these students will become professors of theology themselves or
translators, at least not without seeking further training in the
years ahead. (China Evangelical Seminary, the different seminary where
I go to find library books, is much more academic in orientation, and
the student workers at the library there are nearly always doing Greek
homework in between serving library patrons.)

According to the bookstore manager at China Evangelical Seminary,
there are no Chinese-language books to serve as Hebrew textbooks or as
Hebrew reference grammars available in Taiwan. I own several of the
recent monographs about Hebrew, bought for my own reading, but I won't
tell you which ones I already have so as not to bias any
recommendations you may have. Where should I begin in getting ready to
teach these students? Which standard textbook would be the best to use
in this circumstance? What books should the students have by the end
of their course? What books should I have, and what journals should I
consult regularly, to be well prepared to teach the course?

Karl M. Bunday  "pray for us" 2 Thessalonians 3:1
P.O. Box 674, Panchiao 220, TAIWAN
http://learninfreedom.org