Canter Bridge

It’s hard to establish where exactly we are these days with regard to learning the biblical languages. On the hand poisonous trends like the cult of relevancy afflict our university and seminary curricula, reducing them to what someone considers ‘practical’ with no attention to historical depth, the damning pace of change, and epistemological humility. More benign trends, such as the proliferation of non-ordination-track M.A. degrees in dozens of ministry fields sometimes push in the same direction.

On the other hand, record enrollment at the finest seminaries, complete with faculties dedicated to biblical studies that include the biblical languages, suggests that the sky is hardly falling. In line with this demographic surge comes the gigantic wave of publication of grammars and tools intended to introduce the theological student to the biblical languages. In the English-speaking world at least, nothing like the present bonanza has ever been seen.

Enter George Landes’ Building Your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary, an entry in the Society of Biblical Literature’s useful Resources for Biblical Study series. Following a helpful introduction to how Hebrew words–particularly verbs—are formed, the bulk of Landes’ offering is a superbly user-friendly presentation of groups of Hebrew words of which one or more members occur frequently in the Bible.

This is something of a hybrid presentation of the biblical Hebrew inventory and one that I find quite useful. It takes up and employs two different systems for listing vocabulary. The first criterion is frequency of use. It is obviously a decision of economy for the student to dedicate his or her time to those words he is going to encounter most frequently in the biblical text.

But then Landes employs a second criterion, that of association. Words that are cognate or otherwise formally related to the frequently-occurring word are listed along with it. This allows the student to pick up less high-frequency words along with the member of the family that occurs frequently. Because meaning often shadows form, the student will use that aspect of the memory that links clusters of words together around shared meaning to increase his intake of new words.

The linguistic purists among us will object that this favors commonality of form and is a version of the old etymological fallacy lurking right at the point of the young student’s greatest vulnerability. No matter. The risk of misleading the learner, it seems to me, is slim. Whatever slight damage may be done by insinuating synonymity on the basis of formal similarity can be undone later with little effort.

Landes scatters this method across three major lists of word clusters.

SBL deserves commendation for publishing a work of great visual clarity at an affordable price.