Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

anstey katav:
>The problem of modern Hebrew speakers apporaching BH is exactly the same
>with Greek. We had three Greek orthodox ordinands in our Koine Greek class
>and they all struggled terribly. But you should have heard them read out
the
>NT at break-neck speed! Even the teacher (Dr John Lee) was impressed.
Their
>services are all in Koine Greek but even that didn't help them. This is
>typical in most languages. So for medieval German and French etc, often
the
>experts are not native speakers. Just an oddity of life.

Hebrew speakers are more like English with Shakespeare. If the modern
person isn't interested, then they don't get shakespeare's idiom correctly.
But if they are interested, do their reading and study, then modern English
gives an incomparable help. Nothing like it. 

How close is it for Hebrew? 
     I went to a play, theatrical performance, last week in which ALL the
texts were taken from the Bible. Actors dress was simple black and modern,
the stage was modern. (It was a special presentation in Jerusalem of a Tel
Aviv company.)
The Camari theatre puts on dramatic,  interpretative/expressive  text
presentations that are no less than stunning. The actress that did the
Nabot's vineyard story with AHav and I-zevel--wow! Switching 'voices', her
voice with Izevel dripped with evil. Another actor who did the Yaakov and
Lavan story with marriage and switching of daughters. wonderful. At the end
of the evening, the audience can hardly believe how profound, and alive
these texts are. Of course, everything is pure Biblical Hebrew, nothing
written. Some things were quite cute. They acted out a list of unclean
animals with mimicked postures. And a list of disqualified priests was very
effective with two girls explaining the defects while a male actor with a
look of half-surprise, half-deadpan punctuated everything with "mum bo" 'he
has a defect'.  Almost as interesting as the perfermance was the
interaction of the audience and actors afterwards, when the actor and two
actresses stood, sat on stage and answered questions from the audience. Who
developed this? How? How do the actors work their interpretation out of a
text? Who would have believed this could be so entertaining?! and people
are willing to pay 85 shekels ($21)! (it's worth every shekel.) How long?
The perfermances have been going on for five years but are scheduled to end
this August. The actors were asked Why? Because performances have a
commercial life. 
So if you come over to Israel this summer be sure to drop by the Camari in
Tel Aviv. 

My point? It was delightful for the Israeli audience to listen to Biblical
cadences and even hear all the pausal forms and irregular dialectic forms
flow with a dramatic presentation. Biblical Hebrew for the theatre, and for
a willing modern ear. 

another example.
Well, my daughter finished a BA at Hebrew U in Hebrew bible. And she and
some of the other classmates had not gone grown up with Hebrew or gone to a
Hebrew high school. So where did the Biblical language come from in class?
Teachers and students simply read, quoted, studied and used the biblical
texts, getting to know them well. They had one 'Biblical Hebrew grammar'
class, too. (You wouldn't think of this approach for modern and old Greek.)
And the kids probably should have had more technical syntax, et al., but
that's another story.

It's alot of fun to discuss and search texts with a mother-tongue speaker
who knows his tana"k and can continually cite the exact wording from who
knows where. 

Anyway, some of the analogies that people bring are 'apples and oranges',
when they should be bringing 'bosenberries and blackberries'.

braxot
Randall Buth