Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 8:59 PM,  Dave Washburn wrote:
>
>
> On 5 Feb 2010 at 9:41, K Randolph wrote:
>
>>
>> I would not waste my time learning modern Hebrew: it is a
>> different
>> language, with a different grammar and many words have different
>> meanings.
>> If you learned modern Hebrew first, then you would have to unlearn a
>> lot of
>> stuff in order to become really fluent in Biblical Hebrew.
>
> Agreed.  Learning modern Hebrew to understand biblical Hebrew is like 
> learning modern
> English in order to understand Beowulf.  The only reason I can see for 
> learning modern
> Hebrew is to interact with some of the literature on biblical Hebrew that's 
> written in MH.  But
> get a solid grasp of biblical Hebrew first so it's not overly confusing.

I don't think the analogy is appropriate.  Semitic languages, and
Hebrew in particular, retain
similarities for a much longer period of time than IE languages, due
in part to the close contact
between them.  This is why they are much harder to classify.  The lack
of vowels also helps,
perhaps.  Furthermore, the Hebrew Bible served as a basic text that
was constantly read over
the generations by everyone who wrote Hebrew, at every stage of
Hebrew, Mishnaic, Medieval,
Modern.  (For the Samaritans, the same exists but with the Samaritan
Pentateuch).   This
means that Modern Hebrew is much more conservative in this regard in
using language from
the Bible, compared to Modern English and its use of Beowulf or Chaucer.

But let's take the analogy.  Do you know someone who recommends
learning Beowulf without
knowing Modern English first?

Yitzhak Sapir