Posted by eteacher on December 21, 2009 under Biblical Hebrew, Language and Genre | 
When it is snowing out there and you find yourself searching for an enriching activity, it’s time to sign up for an online Biblical Hebrew course. Here are 4 reason why it’s excatly the time for doing it now:
- Weather –while every outdoor activity is impossible, learning Biblical Hebrew online with Israeli teacher fits you like a glove.
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- Vocabulary – wouldn’t you like to learn how to say "God bless you" or "the Holy Bible book" in Hebrew?
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Posted by Eli Dahan on August 11, 2009 under Bible, Biblical Hebrew, Language and Genre |
What can we say about love that has not been written? Millions of words have been written about it, and it seems to be that every minute that we are living, there are more and more to learn, to read and to write about this endless subjectLet us focus today in some idioms from the Old Testament that speak about love.
Jacob and Rachel
If we want to speak about real love, like Lennon sang after death, we
need to look in the book of Genesis and we will find a lot of this .famous for all us is the love between Jacob and Rachel. Jacob wanted to marry Rachel as he saw her near the well, and he needed to work seven years in order to marry her. The Scriptures described the love of Jacob with 6 lovely words, as written in Genesis 29:20-
“וַיִּהְיוּ בְעֵינָיו כְּיָמִים אֲחָדִים בְּאַהֲבָתוֹ אֹתָהּ”
“So Jacob served seven years to get Rachel, but they seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her”
The time is not preventing Jacob to stop loving Rachel and wait for her. The seven years was only days in the eyes of the lover. The time couldn’t stop the love from being alive, breathing, kicking and happening.
One can only imagine the days that Jacob worked for Laban, waiting for the time to pass, in order to be with his beloved girl. This is the real love, the love that the time can shut off, the love that the years are not ruining. May all of us will give and get this love to our universe.
To be continued…
Main phrases of the post + transcription + translation
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Hebrew
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Transcription
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Translation
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יוֹם
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yôm
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Day
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שָׁנָה
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šānāh
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Year
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רָחֵל
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rāhēl
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Rachel
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נִיב
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nîb
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Idiom
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יַעֲקֹב
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Ya’ăqob
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Jacob
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זְמַן
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zəman
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Time
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שֶׁבַע
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Šeba’
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Seven
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Eli@eteachergroup.com
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Posted by Bronwen Manning on March 5, 2008 under Language and Genre |
The Tetragrammaton Yhwh is the personal name for the God of Israel and Judah as revealed to Moses in the Wilderness (Exodus 3:14). This name is first attested to outside the bible in the late ninth century Mesha Inscription, where the enemy king of Moab announces “I took the vessels of Yhwh and dragged them before Chemosh” (line 17). It is unmistakable that Yhwh was worshipped and his name was known and spoken by even Israel’s neighbours. However it happened that the nation of Israel went from a time when they knew the name of their God, and spoke it, to a time where they forgot the proper pronunciation, and avoided using it.
This change began to occur in the late Second Temple Period when the Jews decided to avoid speaking the name of Yhwh in public places. By the time of the Middle Ages the name of their God was not spoken at all, and in fact the knowledge of how to correctly pronounce Yhwh had been forgotten. Instead the simple title ‘Lord’ was preferred and used, one reason was to safeguard against intended or unintended blasphemy.
The correct pronunciation of Yhwh and its meaning has been the subject of much scholarly debate and a great effort has been made to recapture what was lost over time. Foremost in understanding of the name Yhwh is to realize that in the Hebrew Bible it is written one way, but pronounced another way entirely; this is called a qere perpetuum. This is when the consonants Y h w h are marked either with the vowels of Adoni (my Lord/Master) or with the vowels of Elohim (God). This was to indicate to those reading the text that they should actually read (qere) “Lord” or “Master” instead of the unspeakably holy name of God! Not knowing this writing convention has led to the erroneous reading of Jehovah which conflates the consonants Yhwh with the vowels of ‘My Master’.
Today it is generally accepted to see Yhwh as a verbal form derived from the root hyh meaning “be at hand, exist, become, come to pass”; and should be pronounced as Yahweh. If translated as a hiphil verb, which is causative, then it appears we are dealing with a sentence name, such as Yahweh Shalom “he creates peace” the name written on Gideon’s altar (Judges 6:24). We have a clue into the eternal and consistent nature of Yahweh through the story in Exodus 3:14 where Yahweh declares
’ehyeh ’asher ’ehyeh. The many translations we have bear testimony to the difficulty in capturing its meaning; “I AM who I AM”; “I create whatever I create” or “I AM The One Who Always Is”. Both ’ehyeh and Yahweh are from the same verb and are attesting to the character of the God who bears its name; a creator who is an eternal being.
Interested in learning Biblical Hebrew? Sign up for a trial lesson at www.classicalhebrew.com
Tags: causative, Chemosh, etymology, hiphil, Masoretic Text, Mesha Inscription, Middle Ages, Moab, qere perpetuum, Second Temple Period, Tetragrammaton, YHWH
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Posted by Naama Baumgarten on January 3, 2008 under Language and Genre |
Parallelism is a prominent feature in Ancient Near Eastern poetry and biblical poetry as such, and is also present in certain cases in biblical prose. The meaning of parallelism is that there is an inherent connection between the two members of a poetic verse: various elements are re-worded and repeated, or changed and re-stated, as part of the stylistic characteristics of the poem. A good example of the simplest kind of parallelism is Deuteronomy 32:1: “(a) Listen, heavens, and I shall speak, (b) and the earth shall hear the words of my mouth”: 1. listening (a) is parallel to hearing (b); 2. heaven (a) is parallel of earth(b); 3. speech (a) is parallel to words of mouth (b). While the first and the third parallelisms listed are obvious, the second teaches us of the types of parallels this style can create: due to the need to have a parallel for each element in the verse, opposites can also serve as parallels when they both come together to convey one and the same meaning: all of creation, heaven and earth, are called to listen to the song.
As part of its stylistic features, the genre of parallelism usually dictates the use of specific word-pairs as parallels: hear-listen, Israel-Jacob, peoples-nations, desert-wilderness, and many more. It is interesting to note that many of the same exact parallels are common in Ugaritic poetry as well.
In terms of the meaning of parallelisms, there are two major types: synonymous parallelisms like the example above, where both members of the verse convey the same meaning in different ways; and antithetic parallelisms, where the two members of the verse convey opposite ideas. Naturally, there are many parallelisms which are hard to classify as either.
From the technical aspect, there are different ways of creating a parallelism: not all the elements in the first member of a verse are necessarily repeated, and often it is the verb or the person addressed which is only stated once and implied in the second member of the verse. The parallel members can either be grammatically identical and organized in the same order (as in the example above), or can be presented in a different order. A common way of doing so is chiastic parallelism, as in Gen 9:6: “One who sheds a man’s blood, by a man shall his own blood be shed.”
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