Ancient Hebrew is best known as the vehicle for religious texts in Judaism and related traditions: the Bible and its rabbinic commentaries, liturgical poetry, legal codes, and other religious genres. Hebrew literacy not only enriches one’s understanding of Judaism, but also early Christianity and other Jewish-Greek cultures. In this course, we will take a significant step in that direction, introducing ourselves to Biblical Hebrew in a rigorous, hands-on, reader-oriented way. We will cover the alphabet, grammar, morphology, syntax, and other linguistic features of Biblical Hebrew, allowing students to read stylistically simple but deeply artful literature like the Book of Ruth, parts of the Book of Job, selections from Genesis such as the Binding of Isaac, and more. Studying the language with a clear focus on reading, rather than linguistic study for its own sake, we will learn and internalize the skills that students need to encounter the narratives as quickly as possible, continuing our study of the language on the basis of challenges that we find in the texts.
Alongside the fundamental tools that students will need to read biblical narratives, we will also explore the Hebrew Bible’s ideologies in relation and in conflict with dominant languages and cultures. In this sense, Critical Ancient Hebrew is also an introduction to a cultural history of the Israelites and the Jews as small minorities who formed contact-zones in vast multiethnic empires. What can a study of their ideologies, barely hidden beneath the surface of their canonical stories, teach us—not only about Israelite/Jewish history and culture in their own right, but also about the processes by which cultures and languages clash and are mutually transformed?
Critical Ancient Hebrew is organized across three, 12-week trimesters: Winter (January 30th-May 1st), Summer (May 22nd-August 7th), and Fall (August 28th-December 4th). Students may enroll in the program in its entirety or on a trimester-by-trimester basis. In addition to weekly 2-hour class meetings, students may elect to attend an additional “homework hour,” a time set aside for further practice and horizontal learning. Our textbooks will be The First Hebrew Primer (3rd ed.) in the first and second trimesters, followed by Readings in Biblical Hebrew: An Intermediate Textbook in the third, to be supplemented by other readings from the Hebrew Bible, its classical commentaries, and a range of scholarly apparatus provided by the instructor, which will aid in comprehension of linguistic questions that we will encounter in the texts. The class size is capped at 12 students.
