Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Randall,

What actually is  "Biblical Hebrew in a spoken BH classroom"? And 
what is its advantage? The reason why I ask is the following 
observation: I teach Norwegian speakers intermediate Biblical Hebrew, 
and also Hebrew on the MA and Ph.D levels. Some years ago a fleshly 
brother and a sister attended my course of intermediate Hebrew. Their 
parents were Norwegians, but they had grown up in Israel and were 
fluent both in Norwegian and modern Hebrew. This background evidently 
was a disadvantage for them. Because of their modern Hebrew 
background, it was not as easy for them to learn Biblical Hebrew (the 
subtleties of the language) as the Norwegian students, and their exam 
results were inferior to the results of the Norwegian students.

I tried to ascertain the reason for this situation, and one 
possibility I thought of was that the two did not work so hard 
because they thought they already mastered Hebrew. My impression, 
however, was that this was not the reason, because they both were 
diligent students. So my conclusion is that it is harder for a 
student with a background in the modern Hebrew  tense system  to 
understand the real nature of the Biblical Hebrew verb conjugations 
and the subtleties of Biblical Hebrew than a Norwegian student who is 
taught that we cannot understand the Hebrew conjugations in the light 
of the Norwegian tense system, and that Biblical Hebrew is very 
different from his or her mother tongue.

In my Hebrew lessons my students learn to read Biblical Hebrew in the 
way we find in the Masoretic text, and they also learn to transcribe 
what they read. This means that our focus is on the written Masoretic 
text and not on a different kind of spoken Hebrew. So again, what is 
the advantage of  "learning Hebrew in a spoken BH classroom,"  and 
what is the relation between this "spoken BH Hebrew" and the 
Masoretic pronunciation of Hebrew?

Best regards,

Rolf Furuli Ph.D

University of Oslo



> A survey question.
>
> How many on this list are learning Biblical Hebrew in a spoken BH classroom?
>
> If not, is this because
>
> 1. a belief that non-spoken methods are more efficient.
>
> 2. for practical reasons, a spoken BH class is not available for you.
>
> 3. a belief that BH is special/dead and shouldn't be spoken as a 
> class language.
>
> Thank you for your responses.
> Randall
>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> randallbuth AT gmail.com
> Biblical Language Center
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
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