What follows is my story. If you believe that learning the biblical languages should be quick or easy—and especially if you’re looking for tea and sympathy—read no further.
===============================================================================
I had the good fortune to learn Hebrew under less than optimal conditions.
In truth, I did not come to the task with much passion. I considered myself a ‘New Testament guy’ and managed to pull off an M.Div. in ways that made it something of a bulked-up M.A. in New Testament. It was John and Paul who lit me up, not Moses and Jeremiah. I had learned Greek in university and nothing was going to get between me and the texts.
But Hebrew was a requirement of the M.Div. and I was not opposed. It had never occurred to me that I might do advanced studies in Bible in the future. I did not take Hebrew so that I could subsequently be admitted to a Ph.D. I simply wanted to know the Bible from as close in as I could and then to teach it as an outflow of that intimate connection. Anything else would have felt like a travesty, like walking past a cave full of diamonds and not poking your head in to see whether any of them lay on the surface for the taking.
My wife and I had just had a baby boy and another was on the way. She worked days at Hewlett Packard and I worked nights loading trucks at UPS in a questionable effort to avoid educational debt that might delay our intended missionary service. It was a grueling job for my twenty-something body, arguably as physically demanding as state-championship-level basketball had been for my teenage body a decade earlier. For two years, I loaded and for another two years I supervised loaders, which meant that I now layered organizational responsibility to the business of loading the trucks of guys who were too sick or drunk or depressed or uncommitted to punch in at 3:00 a.m. It was nobody’s only job. We were all at the end of the rope.
For me it was exhausting and necessary in equal measure, a way to get through seminary without starving.
On weekends, my wife and I refreshed ourselves by serving as youth pastors at our church. But that’s another story.
My aging Ford Pinto didn’t have heat and we were too poor to find out why and get it fixed. Often in the New England winter my 35-minute drive to work would take place behind the wheel of a car where the temperature was a single digit, Fahrenheit. I would often yell at the top of my lungs as I charged down the dark highway in order to stay awake, my whole body shaking from the cold.
After work, stinking from a night shift’s perspiration, I would drive to the day-care center on days when I didn’t have morning classes in order to pick up our infant son Christopher, whom my wife had dropped off two hours before on her way to work. Our cars would pass on Route 128, she heading west, me heading east. I would study all day while looking after Christopher. Once I woke up with the impress of the carpet on my face, having fallen asleep on the floor while crawling after my diapered-up boy.
Because my alarm clock went off at 1:30 a.m., I would regularly tell visiting friends at about 9:00 p.m., ‘You may stay as long as you want. But please turn off the lights when you’ve finished.’
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays after the night’s work, I would drive past our apartment into the rising sun and continue on the additional half hour to the seminary. My car would shake almost uncontrollably at 58 mph, so I’d keep it steady at 57. Arriving at the seminary fifteen to twenty minutes after Hebrew class had begun, I’d throw a sweatshirt on to protect the other students from my sweaty stench. I’d stop by the cafeteria to snag two donuts and two cups of coffee in a sometimes failed effort to wake myself up and stay awake for the duration of Hebrew class, gulp it all down, and head down the hall to the last classroom on the left.
I’d let myself sheepishly into the classroom where class was already in session, find an empty seat, and begin to pay attention to the prof’s explanations of things that were by their vary nature alien and new. Our textbook was Thomas Lambdin’s classic Introduction to Biblical Hebrew, the work of the famed Harvard linguist who had written grammars of several ancient Semitic languages. Neither Lambdin’s book nor our prof—who had been Lambdin’s student—suffered fools. Terms like ‘compensatory lengthening’ and ‘inalterably long vowels’ were explained patiently but just once. After that you were expected to understand or figure it out at home.
I clearly remember boiling with rage in class one morning as I struggled to penetrate the logic of dagesh forte, dagesh lene, and whether a freakin’ syllable was open or closed. I felt as if I were being tortured for the satisfaction of Thomas Lambdin, of our prof, or of some unseen, malevolent curriculum writer. It was humiliating. I had graduated summa cum laude in university and this was just seminary.
It took everything I had in me and more not to fold my cards and go home. At times I wanted nothing else. But I wanted to read and teach the Bible more. So I stayed.
I did not ask the prof to tutor me privately. If I missed a quiz, I did not ask the prof to extend the available time because I had failed to read the syllabus and did not realize we had a quiz today. I felt I was the poorest student in the classroom because on any given day all the other students were at least fifteen minutes and one or two topics ahead of me. I did not blame the curriculum or suggest that the prof had enjoyed more privileges than me or that Hebrew is more difficult for students who come from rural Pennsylvania Dutch contexts. I did not ask whether we could use a different textbook with fewer irritating details in it. I did not ask ‘how many hours of study are expected of me?’
In time, I found a toe-hold in the language. Barely. Then I got the other foot up onto the cliff. Eventually, I found that I could read the Hebrew Bible. I still learn something new in its pages nearly every day.
The Hebrew Bible still regularly slaps me around and calls me ‘Boy!’. When people ask—as they do—‘How long did it take you to learn Hebrew?’, my only honest answer is ‘I don’t know yet’.
But I live with this book now. It’s God-haunted. It’s inexhaustibly rich and alternately reassuring and deconstructing in the way of a very wise and somewhat recalcitrant uncle whom you can’t live with and can’t live without. It defies creeds and confessions and insists that I think again, that I look more closely, that I consider the unthinkable. If you ask me about a passage from the Old Testament and tell me I can’t look at the text, all I’ll be able to do for you is stare, glassy-eyed. It’s inside of me now. It’s taken nearly forty years and it’s still not finished with me.
If Providence brings us together as student and professor with biblical Hebrew standing formidably astride the landscape before us, and if you feel that your conditions are not optimal for working as hard as our subject is going to ask us to work, be careful what you say.
I had the good fortune to learn Hebrew, under less than optimal conditions. I hope you have the same good fortune.
Canter Bridge 