Background

I started studying biblical Hebrew in my second year of Bible college way back in 1999. So far, it’s been a twenty-seven-year dance with the language and what it presents to us. I’ve loved this language and the texts that have come down to us in it, both from the biblical period and from later periods of history. Almost anyone who sits through one of my live lessons will know that I’m excited about what we find in segolate constructions, in which consonant clusters undergo some type of resolution to create new syllables and to break up the cluster. This is something that I took interest in during that first year of study of BH (Biblical Hebrew) at Ozark Christian College (OCC) under Dr. Larry Pechawer, and every time I get to teach or talk about segolates in class sessions, I might go a bit overboard in my excitement to show just how prevalent this feature of the language’s morphology actually is. It appears everywhere and influences everything in the language. If understanding the use of participles is the key to mastering ancient Greek, then understanding the phenomenon of segolates is the key to unlocking comprehension of Hebrew morphology. I’m convinced of this.

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