With James and Andy aboard (both seasoned bloggers), JT’s readership should be safe. (Happy travels, JT!) My relationship to blogging tends to be in the form of drive-by commenting, so we’ll see how this goes.
Meanwhile, one of my jobs as a teacher of biblical languages is to get the inevitable rote-learning to go down deep, so that the Hebrew (or Greek, or Aramaic) becomes a language, and not just an obscure code for what we already knew the text meant from our favourite translation.
So this Olympically-themed exhortation from John Hobbins caught my eye:
As of now, biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek are for forgetting, not remembering, in the life of most people who have studied them. I used to think that the placement of knowledge of biblical languages into cold storage by those who studied them, however cursorily, is a mountain that will never be moved in our generation. Then I saw the movie Chariots of Fire and thought, if someone can give their heart and soul to an athletic sport with such tenacity, why can’t a few men and women give their heart to fulfilling Deuteronomy 6:6- 9 with the same tenacity?
For those of you who have toiled over your biblical Hebrew and koine Greek, read the whole post, and be inspired.
