Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Phil King" <phil_king AT sil.org>]

I’m teaching a course in Biblical Hebrew starting next week to Papua New 
Guinean Bible Translators and looking for some ideas to teach stems and 
conjugations in ways that will ‘stick’ and that don’t rely too much on 
English.  

This will be the second course for all these folk, who have already taken a 
course based half on Randy Buth’s Living Biblical Hebrew, half on 
dramatizations of the Elijah stories. So they are able to read Hebrew writing 
fairly well, and have an intuitive grasp of basic grammar, but haven’t yet 
been exposed to much, if any, grammatical terminology. I have them for four 
weeks and want to try and create a bridge from their elementary intuitive 
understanding of the grammar and vocabulary to a stage where they can relate 
to lexicons, commentaries, software etc. that refer to qal, piel, hiphil,… 
and perfect, imperfect, imperative etc… 

The challenge is that these folks all come from different language groups, 
have limited English, and very limited linguistic background. Also I’m trying 
to get them to think of grammatical categories through the categories of 
their own vernaculars rather than through English (or Latin) categories. So I 
like to do things through pictures, drama and action – to help them 
cognitively link straight from Hebrew to their own vernaculars without 
getting bogged down in English in between. 

I’m wondering if anyone has any resources or ideas for pictures, dramas or 
actions that could help them conceptually grasp the different stems and the 
different conjugations? For example, perhaps we could act out together 
qatalti, niqtalti, qitalti, hiqtalti, hitqatalti (excuse the spellings) in a 
way that would give them a visual ‘peg’ to hang the stem concepts onto – but 
as this root is actually so rare in Biblical Hebrew, and I’m not totally sure 
what qitalti would mean – I wonder if anyone has other ideas? I’d been 
thinking sh-b-r might be easier – although I’m not sure how to act out ‘being 
broken’. Is there another good root which actually shows up in several 
different stems, that could be somewhat easily acted out? Or does anyone have 
a good set of different verbs – one for each conjugation – that could be 
acted out? 

For conjugations, I’ve seen Greek books which represent aorist as a dot and 
other tenses as lines or sequences of dots, but I’m not sure that really 
works for perfect vs. imperfect. Nor an idea someone else used for Greek with 
people stepping forward for future and backwards for aorist – that would 
suggest too much tense orientation for the Hebrew to my mind, as opposed to 
aspect or other interpretations of the different forms. Are there established 
visual ways of conceptualizing the meanings of Hebrew conjugations, that we 
could either draw or act out?

Has anyone else ever done anything like this, or have any ideas they could 
share?

Thanks,
Phil King
SIL PNG

 

PS. I know that many lexicographers would teach different stems as entirely 
separate semantic entities, and so that would undermine the idea here – but 
in terms of using lexicons and relating to other grammar books, the root and 
stem approach is still going to give them some conceptual help.