A brief introduction to Hebrew.

No, I’m not teaching you Hebrew. Not yet, anyway.

It’s important to know about Hebrew, because the Old Testament (a.k.a. the Hebrew scriptures) were originally written in Hebrew. For that reason, here’s a brief introduction to the ancient Hebrew language.

We don’t know when ancient Hebrew first arose as a spoken language. Or where it arose. Best guess is it’s something the Canaanites first spoke, and Abraham came to speak it after he moved into that territory—for Abraham’s great-great-nephew Laban wound up speaking a different language than Abraham’s grandson Jacob. Ge 31.47 The first we hear of it as a written language was when Moses began writing down the LORD’s sayings in the 1400s BC. Ex 17.14 The first archeological evidence of written Hebrew dates from the 900s.

There are two kinds of Hebrew we find in the Old Testament: Early biblical Hebrew, and later biblical Hebrew. The later stuff, which we find in the Writings (i.e. Job, Psalms, Esther, Chronicles, etc.) has a bigger vocabulary—loan-words from Aramaic and Arabic, among others, seeped into the language. Plus it has a more flexible style.

But round the time the last books of the OT were written, the Israelis, due to their years of living in Babylon, now spoke the Babylonian language of Aramaic. Hebrew stopped being a spoken language, and didn’t become one again till the 20th century of our era, when Jewish settlers in Palestine decided they should speak Hebrew and revived the language. Modern Israeli Hebrew is a bit different. Today’s Israelis can understand the bible, but it’s a bit like an English-speaker reading Shakespeare: People don’t talk like that anymore.

Spoken Hebrew.

Ancient Hebrew was meant to be read aloud.

We live in a literate culture: The overwhelming majority of us know how to read. We’re so used to the idea, we forget it hasn’t always been the case. Cultures in ancient times were oral: They couldn’t read, had very little access to written material or literate people, and had to memorize all their important information.

So the bible was written to be read aloud to such people. The reason it’s phrased the way it is—with lots of poetry, lots of redundancies, lots of clever turns of phrase—was for a listening audience. Listeners need that stuff. Hence we find a lot of redundancies like

• He captured captives.
• He lifted his eyes and saw…
• He answered him, saying…
• He fed them with food, with which they were fed.

And don’t forget the really repetitive parts of Leviticus, where 12 different tribes practice the very same ritual 12 times, or God gives the very same instructions for how to sacrifice four or five different animals. It makes some parts of the bible slow reading for us literate folks. But it was meant to hammer the point home for listeners.

Written Hebrew.

The alphabet we use for Hebrew isn’t the original paleo-Hebrew alphabet. (Kinda like how English uses the Latin alphabet instead of runes.) It was replaced with the Aramaic alphabet round the 400s BC, and evolved into the “square-script” letters people use today.

Some claim Hebrew has no vowels, but that’s not so: It has few vowels. The letter י (yod) is a vowel, but it’s often transliterated—converted into our Latin alphabet—as a Y. Other letters, like ה (he) or ו (vav), are sometimes vowels, just like Y and W. But Hebrew tends to be written without vowels, and fluent speakers know where to pronounce them so they can recognize, say, ‘VRHM as Abraham.

In the 700s, scribes of the ben Asher family, whom we know as the Masoretes, created a bunch of marks (Hebrew niqqud) to put around the letters, indicating which vowel sounds came before, after, or instead of them. Since by this point Hebrew hadn’t been a spoken language for a thousand years, we’re not entirely certain the ancients actually pronounced it that way. But it’s how modern Hebrew-speakers pronounce it, so good enough.

Here’s a table of the letters, and how they’re transliterated. A dot within the letter (Hebrew dagesh) is not a different letter, but it does change the pronunciation a little. An apostrophe (Hebrew geresh) after the letter will do likewise—though we tend to see apostrophes in modern Hebrew, not biblical Hebrew. As for the final forms, when a letter is at the end of a word (i.e. the mem at the end of Abraham) a different form of the letter is used instead of the usual.

letter	cursive	name	sound	translit.	final	cursive
א		alef	beginning of word: a vowel middle: ʔ, a glottal stop	none ‘
ב		vet bet	v b with dagesh [בּ]	v b
ג		gimel	g dʒ with garesh [ג׳]	g j
ד		dalet	d ð with garesh [ד׳]	d th
ה		he	h a as a vowel	h ah
ו		vav waw	v, sometimes w o, u as a vowel	v, w o, u
ז		zayin	z	z
ח		khet	χ (sounded with the back of the throat)	ch, kh
ט		tet	t	t
י		yod	j i, e as a vowel	y i, e
כ		khaf kaf	χ k with dagesh [כּ]	kh, ch k	ך
ל		lamed	l	l
מ		mem	m	m	ם
נ		nun	n	n	ן
ס		samekh	s	s
ע		ayin	beginning of word: a vowel middle: ʔ, a glottal stop; or ŋ	none ’
פ		fe pe	f p with dagesh [פּ]	f p	ף
צ		tsadi	ts tʃ with geresh [צ׳]	ts ch	ץ
ק		qof	k	k, q
ר		resh	ʁ	r
ש		shin sin	ʃ dot on right [שׁ] s dot on left [שׂ]	sh s
ת		tav	t θ with geresh [ת׳]	t th

Hebrew is written right-to-left. (English, written left-to-right, is backwards. Hebrew came first, y’know.) Computers, supposedly for convenience’s sake but they really suck at implementing it, sometimes let us input Hebrew characters right-to-left, and sometimes don’t and flip ’em over for us. So if the Hebrew on this page comes out all wonky, sorry. I tried. In any event, when you try to read Hebrew, or sound out a Hebrew word, or transliterate ’em, remember: Right-to-left. (Say you were working your way through אלהים, “God”: Start with the rightmost letter, א, and work your way left—‘LHIM, or Elohim.)

Hebrew pronunciation.

Some of you might already know Jesus’s actual Aramaic name is Yeshúa. It evolved into “Jesus” as a result of getting converted into Greek Yesús then Latin Iesús, then English Jesus. The same happened with a lot of the more familiar and common Hebrew names. Yaaqóv became Jacob (and in the New Testament, James). Moishe became Moses.

Less common names, like Eliphaz, Azrikam, Libni, and so forth, haven’t been converted much. Every time somebody re-translates the bible, they re-transliterate these names. But if you struggle to pronounce them, it’s not too hard to do. Here are the usual rules of thumb:

• You already know how to pronounce the consonants.
• The vowels: Think of ’em like Spanish or French vowels. a, e, i, o, u Don’t go pronouncing them like American-style long vowels, eɪ, i, aɪ, oʊ, ju. Remember, these are foreign-language names.
• Don’t mash vowels together. Michael is properly mi.χa'el not 'maɪ.kəl. Saul is properly ʃa'ul not sɔːl. Pronounce vowels individually, with rare exceptions.
• Accent is usually on the last syllable, not the first. David is da'vid not 'deɪ.vɪd. Abraham is av.ra'ham not 'eɪ.brə.hæm. (There are of course exceptions, like Habakkuk, ha'bak.uk. But not too many.)
• When in doubt, find out how Spanish-speakers pronounce these words. Usually they’re right.

When I was a kid, I had an edition of the King James Version which included pronunciation marks on the names. If you have such a bible, follow their pronunciations; they get ’em right.

But don’t worry too much about pronouncing the more famous names properly. English-speakers are often so used to the wrong pronunciations, they won’t know who you’re talking about. Sad but true.

A note about God’s name. Like I said, the Masoretes added vowel-marks to Hebrew to indicate how to pronounce everything. In the case of God’s name יהוה, they actually didn’t use the correct vowel-marks; they used the vowel-marks for adonái/“my Lord,” to remind devout Jews to avoid saying God’s holy name, and just call him LORD instead. (As we Christians still do.) Anyway, scholars in the middle ages managed to get confused by this, and concluded God’s name was Iehowah, which is how we got our English word Jehovah. But properly it’s Yahweh, or YHWH—although I tend to stick to custom and call him LORD.

Looking at the original Hebrew helps. But sometimes not.

Part of the reason I originally studied Hebrew was ’cause I wanted to know what the bible really said.

As if the translators of our more popular bibles were hiding dirty little secrets from the general public. ’Cause that’s the sense I got from my pastors. A lot of them were the sort of preachers who enjoyed telling us, “I know your bible says such-and-so, but in the original Hebrew, it really means…” and then we’d hear about some fascinating hidden, secret meaning. Made you want to learn Hebrew, and discover these secrets for yourself.

Truth be told, a lot of those meanings aren’t all that secret. You’ll find ’em in every Hebrew dictionary. It’s just that translators tend to be awfully traditional. The public doesn’t like their bibles to sound too different from the good old KJV and NIV. (Unless they do, which is why The Message sells so well.) Whenever a publisher updates the language in a new edition of the bible, they don’t always update it all that much.

And when you know the original, you also get to know all the problems with translating a foreign language—specifically an ancient foreign language. There are certain parts of the bible which are mighty hard to translate.

Sometimes the writers didn’t bother to use verbs. It’s like the old Frankenstein movies, where the monster shouts “Fire bad!” and you’re meant to deduce there’s an “is” in the middle of the sentence. But in Hebrew there are several verbs you could insert in there, like “becomes” or “produces” or “feels” or “does.” Ancient speakers were assumed to know which verb was implied—but we’re not ancient speakers.

When they did use verbs, early biblical Hebrew only has two verb tenses: Perfect (the verb’s action is done; we tend to translate it as past or present tense) and imperfect (the verb’s action goes on; we tend to translate it every which way). Word order will hint at what the writer meant. Even so, any future-tense parts of the Old Testament, or any command verbs, are just educated guesses.

Sometimes we just plain don’t know what the words mean. “Gopher wood,” fr’instance. Ge 6.14 Noah was told to make his ark out of it, but we have no idea what the Hebrew word gofér means. It has nothing to do with ground squirrels. The Septuagint’s translators thought it meant tetragónon/“cubic,” and the NIV and NLT decided to guess “cypress.” But nobody knows, and we can’t deduce them through poetry or related words. There are about 400 such words in the Old Testament.

And Hebrew, like every language, has idioms. Certain Hebrew phrases, like yikhár apí/“my nose burns,” Ex 32.10 ought not be translated literally. Most translators know what it really means, and interpret it, “my fierce anger may blaze,” as in the NLT. Other times they won’t interpret it, but leave it literal—like when they’re translating poetry, or when the writers of the bible were referring to sexual activity. (After all, children read the bible.)

Yeah, there are lots of people who like to proudly say, “I like to read the NASB” (or KJV, or NKJV, or Amplified, or ESV) “because it’s such a literal translation.” Nope, they don’t know what they’re talking about. A literal translation wouldn’t bother to interpret all these confusing parts, and simply leave the readers confused.

So bear this in mind. Knowing Hebrew doesn’t mean you’ll really know what the bible means. It only means you’ll discover all the problems scholars have with translating it. You’ll grow to appreciate them, which is nice. (And you’ll grow not to appreciate all the folks who preach the dictionary.)

Why should you care about Hebrew?

Once you know a little about Hebrew—and get familiar with the alphabet; it’ll really come in handy—it’s much easier to use original-language reference materials. Like dictionaries, lexicons, concordances, and so forth.

True, some Christians never use these things, and figure they’re doing just fine without ’em. They don’t know what they’re missing, and don’t really care, ’cause they think Hebrew is beyond them—it’s too foreign, too hard, and not something they’d use often enough. And true, they may not need to go so far as to actually read Hebrew. But they won’t even touch this introduction. This, they figure, is beyond them.

It’s a shame. There’s so much you can access with this little intro alone.

Be careful, though. This is only an introduction. It’s no substitute for actually learning Hebrew. Never assume that because you know a little about Hebrew, you’ll know enough to take on Hebrew scholars or Hebrew-speakers. Learn from them—or study in order to become one of them.