Author: Jason Hare

I’m originally from Southwest Missouri, but I’ve been living in Israel since 2007. In college, I studied Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, French, and American Sign Language. I’ve had the Hebrew Café domain for many years, during which we used it for a set of forums for Jewish people from all different communities. I currently teach a biblical Hebrew course that is running on YouTube. We are about to begin the second section of that course (HE102), which uses Kutz and Josberger’s Learning Biblical Hebrew. I have two students of modern Hebrew that are working through Rosén’s A Textbook of Israeli Hebrew.

Finishing Up Beginning Biblical Hebrew II

Posted on by Jason Hare

The end of our Beginning Biblical Hebrew II course (HE102) is upon us. The last part of the textbook deals with weak verbs of various kinds. The chapter titles from Learning Biblical Hebrew: Reading for Comprehension are as follows:

Chapter 25: III-Waw/Yod Verbs
Chapter 26: I-Waw/Yod Verbs
Chapter 27: II-Waw/Yod Verbs: Introduction
Chapter 28: II-Waw/Yod Verbs: Niphal–Hophal Stems
Chapter 29: Geminate Verbs
Chapter 30: I-Nun Verbs
Chapter 31: I-Guttural Verbs
Chapter 32: II-Guttural Verbs
Chapter 33: III-Guttural and III-Aleph Verbs

Since I actually enjoy weak verbs, we’ve covered most of these in principle throughout the course. I’ve decided that we’re going to combine these final chapters to reduce the time spent on them. The principles related in these chapters have been discussed at many points in this course. For example, the fact that I-Nun roots will display assimilation of the nun when it ends up against another root letter without an intervening vowel. This is how נָפַל ‘he fell’ follows the normal imperfect pattern, but that the nun assimilates, unlike in the normal strong verb.

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Finding Comprehensible Input in Modern Hebrew

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Dr. Stephen Krashen (whom I’ve mentioned in this blog before in connection to free voluntary reading) has convincingly argued again and again in favor of the success achieved in second-language acquisition by the use of comprehensible input for the conveyance of messages between speakers. In December of last year, he published a talk on his website called Optimal Input, in which he talks about the parameters of quality input for the purpose of acquiring a second language, and these are extremely useful for those who are learning Hebrew. This is what he had to say about how language input can be optimized (Krashen, 2019, pg. 1–2):

  1. It is comprehensible. This does not mean that every detail is comprehensible: Input can be quite comprehensible even if there is some “noise” in the input, some incomprehensible bits. This includes unknown vocabulary and grammar rules that have not yet been acquired but are not important for comprehension. In other words, language acquisition does not require that you understand every word and every part of every word, but language acquirers should understand most of it.
  2. Optimal input is very interesting, or “compelling.” Compelling input is so interesting you temporarily forget that it is in another language. If input is comprehensible and compelling, acquirers will often not notice the noise in the input.
  3. Quality: Optimal input is rich in language that contributes to the message and flow of the story or text. The language included in the input also gives the reader support in understanding and therefore acquiring new aspects of language. It is not necessary to make sure that certain grammar and vocabulary are used: Rich input automatically includes new, unacquired language that acquirers are ready for (i+1).
  4. Quantity: It takes a great deal of comprehensible compelling rich input to achieve competence. Optimal input is therefore abundant, which will provide more opportunities for acquisition of new language.

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Doubly Weak and Proud of It!

Posted on by Jason Hare

When it comes to categorizing and labeling Hebrew verbs, we can do so in several ways. First, we can look at what general patterns (“stems” or בִּנְיָנִים) the verb appears. This is similar to Latin’s verb conjugations, by which nouns are categorized by the forms they take in the infinitive (whether -āre, -ēre, -ere, or -īre). In Hebrew, roots may appear generally in seven stems, though there are a few outliers here and there in peculiar stems as well, and we can label verbs as “qal” or “piel” or “hiphil” (or whatever stem they appear in by their nature).

Another common way to group Hebrew verbs is by the gutturals or vowel letters that they contain and the position in which they are found in the root.

The guttural letters are ʾalef (א), heh (ה), ḥet (ח), and ʿayin (ע). Resh (ר) is sometimes included in the list because it behaves similarly to them. The vowel letters (know in Latin as matres lectionis) are heh (ה), vav (ו), and yod (י). Notice that heh is both a guttural and a mater lectionis (sg. of matres lectionis). Since nun (נ) tends to assimilate into other letters, many roots with nun are also considered weak, depending on its position in the word. When these letters appear in a root, they mess up the normal pattern, and those mess-ups are predictable and regular.

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Basics of Hebrew Discourse – A Review

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Patton, Matthew, and Putnam, Frederick. Basics of Hebrew Discourse: A Guide to Working with Hebrew Prose and Poetry. Edited by Miles Van Pelt. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019.

In October of last year, I pre-ordered a copy of Patton and Putnam’s much acclaimed book on discourse analysis principles as they relate to biblical Hebrew (pictured to the right). Book Cover: Basics of Hebrew Discourse (click to enlarge)I picked it up and read quickly through it in the first week that I had it. It’s certainly not a disappointment!

The first thing that you notice about the book is its compact size. It is definitely smaller than I expected, especially given the way that Zondervan has taken to making their language series books inordinately large lately. I didn’t pay attention to the dimensions when I placed the order, so I expected to hold in my hands a volume about as large as the recent editions of Basics of Biblical Hebrew and Basics of Biblical Greek. This book is nothing like those. You can easily toss it in any handbag to take it with you to the coffee house (once we’re on the other side of the COVID-19 restrictions—may it be בִּמְהֵרָה בְיָמֵ֫ינוּ [soon in our days]!) to sit and read at your leisure and then take back home to mull over and work through the examples on your own.

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Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) & Hebrew

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Dr. Stephen Krashen talks and writes a lot about the importance of free voluntary reading (FVR) in the process of second-language acquisition. Check out the following video of a lecture he gave in Hong Kong on the value of stories in acquiring a language.

When it comes to free voluntary reading, you have several types of literature that you can choose from in order to increase the exposure you have to the Hebrew language.

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Weingreen – Exercise 32 #1

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The following is the first English-to-Hebrew drill from Exercise 32 of Weingreen’s A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew. Participation in the translation drills dropped off, so I’ve decided to continue on my own. My dear friend Jonathan is welcome to post his work as a comment on this blog post, but I’m not going to continue to post the threads on B-Hebrew when no one seems interested. Perhaps this is a personal task that I will need to go forward on alone (or with Jonathan).

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Aramaic and Hebrew Personal Pronouns

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You may know that I’m currently leading a group through a study of The Basics of Biblical Aramaic (BBA) from the Zondervan Language Basics series. Last week we covered chapter 9, which you can view here on our YouTube channel (youtube.com/thehebrewcafe).

You may also be aware of the project known as the Daily Dose of Hebrew  (DDH), which is currently working through Deuteronomy chapter 7. I happened to passively listen through their playlist of Deuteronomy chapter 5 while working on other things online today, and once I got a chance I decided to just open up the chapter and read through it on my own. The following verse (5:23 or 5:27, depending on your version [DDH Video]) jumped out at me because of a connection to what we covered in Aramaic this week:

Deuteronomy 5:23 (Hebrew = 5:27 in Christian Bibles)

קְרַ֤ב אַתָּה֙ וּֽשְׁמָ֔ע אֵ֛ת כָּל־אֲשֶׁ֥ר יֹאמַ֖ר יַהְוֶ֣ה אֱלֹהֵ֑ינוּ וְאַ֣תְּ ׀ תְּדַבֵּ֣ר אֵלֵ֗ינוּ אֵת֩ כָּל־אֲשֶׁ֨ר יְדַבֵּ֜ר יַהְוֶ֧ה אֱלֹהֵ֛ינוּ אֵלֶ֖יךָ וְשָׁמַ֥עְנוּ וְעָשִֽׂינוּ׃

Notice that the expression וְאַתְּ תְּדַבֵּר “and you shall speak.” This looks like grammatical discord. We would expect to see either וְאַתָּה תְּדַבֵּר‎ (2ms) or וְאַתְּ תְּדַבְּרִי‎ (2fs), but what we actually see seems odd.

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How I Go About My Translations

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Or: Weingreen English-Hebrew Translation, Exercise 31, Number 6

I’ve mentioned before that we are doing English-to-Hebrew translation exercises from Weingreen’s A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew as entertainment, not as a formal study. I figured that I would post the exercise that I have just posted on B-Hebrew and give you some insight into what goes into my thinking when I produce my translations. You are free to comment and let me know if you agree or disagree with my decisions and why.

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How I Agree with Nehemia Gordon

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It might surprise some to learn that I have more in common with Nehemia Gordon than not. After all, I spend a lot of time talking about why I believe he is wrong about the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton. It’s truly not a feud that I have with him personally, since I would agree with the great majority of his stances on biblical issues (as far as I’ve understood them). In this post, I want to enumerate the ways in which I agree with Nehemia Gordon so that people don’t think that I oppose everything he has to say.

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