Biblical Hebrew: Part 3 – Multiple Languages

Working knowledge of biblical Hebrew is critical to understanding and translating the Old Testament. Whether you’re a complete beginner or an experienced learner, lessons 34–52 of this certificate program can help you become a fluent reader of biblical Hebrew by providing the resources, system, and motivation you need to learn efficiently, retain effectively, and develop fluency during every stage of the language learning process. The goal is not to just learn and retain Hebrew but to be able to actually use it!

Certificate Learning Objectives

• Vocabulary: Words learned—456 content words (for a total of 1,248 words; also excludes grammatical words)
• Language Skills:
  1. Reading proficiency: Be able to read narrative Bible texts without the aid of a dictionary and with a fair degree of fluency (about 100 words per minute)
  2. Writing proficiency: Can construct complex sentences and write simple stories
  3. Listening proficiency: Can listen to and understand narrative Bible texts without the aid of a dictionary 
  4. Speaking proficiency: Can construct complex sentences and tell simple stories
• Grammar Knowledge:
  1. Morphology: Final forms are covered that are necessary for reading the Bible, including irregular forms in all the templates; rules for forming object suffixes; rules for pausal forms; working knowledge of most conjunctions; coverage of the more difficult and rare nominal and adjectival patterns
  2. Syntax: Working knowledge of how constituent order may affect pragmatic meaning; ability to produce rare non-standard sentence types (optatives, exclamatives, complex infinitives)
  3. Semantics: All uses of the verbal forms and how they relate to the verbs’ semantics; rarer nominal uses of the nominative, accusative, dative, and construct; different interpretations of scalar adjectives; knowledge of the functions of rarer particles, prepositions, and conjunctions

Note: These skills will vary from student to student, depending on whether they concentrate on speaking, writing, listening, or reading. There are opportunities to practice all of these skills within the application, but it is up to the students to focus on what they deem to be most necessary.

Before registering for this course, you will need to have completed Biblical Hebrew: Part 1 and Part 2 to interact and identify with the material discussed in this course.