MY JOURNEY IN LEARNING HEBREW

My Journey in Learning Hebrew

This article was written in August 2019


By Stephen Ng 

About three months ago (around May 2019), I suddenly had a strong urge to learn Hebrew. 

For whatever reason, I started searching for materials that I could use to learn the original language used in the writing of the Old Testament. 

The first thing I did was to search for the Hebrew text of the Old Testament to feel what it is like. 

Well, guess what? I did not know where to begin or what to make of it. Is it more like Bangla, Hindi or Japanese? It certainly looked foreign to me. 

But now, three months later, I am able to read the Hebrew text albeit with some difficulties. I am like a Primary One child learning to read Mandarin for the first time, but I press on. 

It all began with just learning the 22 consonants of the Hebrew alphabet. It took me a week to practise all the letters from Aleph to Tav, learning just four letters each day. This was how I redeemed my lost hours, while waiting for my appointments. 

With these letters of the alphabet, I started figuring out some words in the Hebrew text. I looked up for more free online materials that are available easily by searching for key words like "Learn Hebrew". This is one example of a video clip which helped me learn the alphabet. 

With some help, I managed to pick up the language. What can one learn in just three months? Of course, there is no way one can master the language in just three months, but it the first step to a journey of learning to read the Old Testament in the original language. 

In my personal opinion, Greek is very much like English, while Hebrew is closer to our Bahasa Malaysia. Because of the origins of the two semantic languages, Hebrew and Arabic, from whence we get a lot of words in Malay, we read them in the Hebrew language as well.

For example, neviim (נְבִיאִים) is the word for the prophets in the Old Testament. It comes from the root word 'nevi' (נְבִיא) or the singular noun for prophet. It is no coincidence that the word Nabi, which came from Arabic, for example, has its similarity to the Hebrew language. 

In the process, I also signed up with the Israel Institute of Biblical Studies on an online 9-month programme on the Hebrew language. 

The benefits of learning Hebrew are aplenty. Besides being able to read the original text, I learn to appreciate the beauty of the language used in the Old Testament. 

New insights are gleaned as I started to look at the Hebrew lexicon, which can be done quite easily these days with the help of Bible software such as Accordance. 

People often give the excuse that they are too old to learn Hebrew, but I encourage them to pick up a new language after reading what the experts say about learning a language to prevent dementia. 

At the same time, I have also set up chat groups that help fellow Christians who want to learn Hebrew together to encourage one another to pick up the language. As Proverbs 27:17 says, "Iron sharpens iron", therefore, in order to learn a language, we need others who share the same passion to encourage one another.