Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Class Two

there okay all right Shalom and welcome to beginning Biblical Hebrew I'm Ross Nichols and this is class 2 take 2 we're going to call it take 2 because I taught this class last week but you only got to see about five minutes of it and that kept going in a loop and I have at least some technical help today so assuming that the internet goes well we should be good to go so I'm glad that you're here with us today those of you who are watching live and for those of you who will be watching later the class looks just as good or just as bad in a replay as that doesn't in life so you don't get anything better either way so hopefully everything will go off again before I get started I'd like to remind you of the goal of the class the goal is that at the end of these five lessons you will be able to read Biblical Hebrew now the thing that I have to say in terms of a disclaimer is that you might have a slight Louisiana accent by the time that you master the Hebrew at the table with me I talked to an Israeli today on skype and they corrected a couple of pronunciations for me but hey the goal again is to be able to read Biblical Hebrew so that you can have or possess the necessary skills to look into Scripture and see things as they were originally written so the goal is to teach you to be able to read I'm also wanting to remind you that I one of my goals is that I'd not bore you along the way that I do all of this without charging you and without requiring you to buy any materials reminder on our website United Israel dot o-r-g United Israel dot o-r-g you can go and you can find brooo helps page where you'll get the charts that I talked about both the alphabet chart the olive Bates chart as well as the vowel sounds chart so both of those documents truly or all that you will need and I say need for this first five-week course because what we want to do is teach you to be able to look at the characters the letters and identify the phonetic value or the approximation of those characters and then to look at the vowel sounds that are on those charts and put them together now I will tell you this by the end of tonight's class towards the end I'm actually going to show you some basics in reading so I think you'll be able to make some sounds looking at letters on the board tonight and you'll get that initial step in reading so I'm looking forward to that I want to tell you by way of encouragement that you can do this so one of the things that I've seen on the facebook group page and I've received emails and messages from various people who were a bit concerned might be struggling a little bit with letters that look alike or letters that sound alike today's class I'm going to help you with that a little bit and we're not in a rush over the next five weeks you won't be introduced to a whole lot of grammar because again this is just teaching you how to read so I'm going to help you get through some of those tough spots hopefully so relax here's here's something you need to know you are more than likely closer today to reading Hebrew than you were last week and even closer than you are the week before so you're making progress this is not a race and there's no shame in where we are I know that some people who've joined this class might have been around Hebrew for a while they might know a lot of Hebrew words but they've never taken the time to really delve into a grammar book and learn how to to read the text or they haven't really learned a lot of vocabulary this is a necessary step in your journey so relax take a deep breath and I promise you that you're going to have fun and you're going to learn some things in terms of a review rather than me take part of our 45 minutes to an hour to go over fully the olive Bay chart I would refer you back to video 1 feel free to watch that as many times as you want and that way I can progress with the classes and we don't have to go over material the same each week so I do want to take some time and talk about a few things though that are going to help us move forward and one of the things if you were calling in lesson one I ask you to do some homework I'm not going to take that up I'm not going to get you to bring it to me in Louisiana or email it to me but I do hope that you made an attempt to write each of the Hebrew letters 10 times at least because that's part of the process of learning the way that we learn a lot of times if you look at something in print you you learn a little bit but then if you write it it helps to put that point deep inside your mind in your brain so I hope you did that one of the things that I saw on the Facebook group page some of the people were saying it's very difficult to draw the letters like the printed form like you see the olive on the board and and the reason that I asked you to attempt to do them according to the printed characters is because I didn't want to introduce you to three different styles which might complicate or confuse so you have the printed form like you see here if you did order the page Kelly Grammer you'll notice on the olive bait chart in that book they have a block form which is sort of a representation of the printed form less stylistic and that's it Leslie just like that one and then there's also a script now over time you'll pick these others up but I wanted you to see one symbol and associate that one symbol with a Hebrew letter rather than show you three different symbols and introduce some confusion so that's the reason that I did that now one of the things that I want you to recognize and one of the things that I saw people were struggling with is some letters that look alike some letters that look like and I'm going to give you an example here just so that I can make this point and I will show you why it's significant and here are two letters that look pretty similar you'll notice if you look at these two letters whoo man these look a lot alike don't they now I want to show you a couple of now this is the print version so this letter is the letter race race okay it has an English approximation of an R this is the Hebrew letter dalet da 'let it has an English approximation of D okay so you would think when you look at these that they look very similar but notice the Dalek is more stylistic in a sense see how this curves in more whereas the race is more of a constant straight line it doesn't have the dip and you have to memorize these you have to learn these and I want to give you an example from the Bible that will demonstrate to you why it is important to do this okay if there's a reason you need to know this here we go now we're just looking at consonants now so I know you can't read some of you might can but you can't read Hebrew yet but you're beginning to learn Hebrew letters so this is an illustration of why it's important to get which letter is being used and learned them well so you don't confuse them this is the Hebrew letter Aleph followed by a hit followed by a dot now in Hebrew there is a word that is translated as one one in Hebrew the word ik HUD a HUD now you don't have vowels here yet but these are the consonants which represent the Hebrew word Akkad meaning one now we're going to talk in the course about this idea of root words we have root words in English as well so when we're talking about the word one I'll show you make sure I'm still on the camera if I take the English word 1o in E there are other words which have the same basic meaning as one that if you look at it so let me add on let's see if it shows up a L alone all right alone is a different word than one but they have the same meaning the root word in English for my illustration is that one is the root idea but there are other words and you know some if I said only the word only in English is tied to the idea of oneness and notice it has some similar letters as the word one how about this what about once if I say once it indicates oneness okay so you get the idea well in Hebrew and this is I want to get you ready for a pitfall that happens sometimes to people in Hebrew and I want to illustrate a biblical in just a moment sometimes people think that these root words which are generally made up of three letters that if a word contains two of the three that it has a similar meaning here's an example in English if I write the word cat CA T and I'm not trying to talk down to people this is a way to illustrate it cat everyone knows what a cat is notice it has a C and an A what if I took that T off and I replaced it with the letter in can any relation to the word cat okay so not at all so what I want you to be aware of is there are people out there who try to make associations or teach biblical doctrines and so forth and they'll sometimes make this mistake of saying you know it's a very similar word think of the example of cat and kin now there's actually an example I can give you in the Bible in Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 4 it says in English most translations read roughly this here o Israel the Lord our God the Lord is one now in Hebrew the word that is used for one is a cud this is the word and the the scribes especially in Orthodox translations want to make sure that you get this and you don't mistake this letter I'll explain Dave I'm going to get you to zoom in for me in a minute this is an added trick I'm just going to throw this at you if you look at Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 4 and let me find it in here okay now I can walk closer if it's easier today I'm going to point here so tight you can get that okay they can see that's good all right so I want people to look at this and I'll show you in just a second those that are in the room you see how that letter is bold and it's bigger than the other letters all right now also this Hebrew I in here is also bold and bigger but I just wanted you to be able to see that it is bold now the reason that's like that in the text okay is because you could make a really bad mistake if you did not see that this was a dollar because adalat Olive pet dollar means at Cod one the Lord is one but if God forbid you thought it was a rash this word in Hebrew and it's root meaning means other so imagine you don't want to talk about God as another God it because that's that's a crime in biblical teaching right so it has to be a cud I just use that as an example to tell you don't get lazy on learning the difference in a dollar in a race they are different they look similar but you can do this you can work through this and see a distinction now there are also letters which and just bear with me because I'll be changing letters out and I want to make sure that I use examples that are illustrative of our points and so some of this will be me swapping letters out and just bear with me there are letters that look the same but there are also letters who have similar sounds similar sounds one such example would be what are called sibilance sibilance are letters which have a s sound and hissing sound almost off the teeth and here are some of those letters I just want to put them on the board so that I can make this example hummock and I want you to be thinking when I post these up I want you to look at them and say oh I know that letter I've been studying all week and this is easy Ross give us something hard to do okay here we go so I'm going to put these on the board and we'll talk about them as I put them up as soon as I get my head out of the way you can identify them because you are already very much familiar with these letters these Hebrew letters are called sibilants if you notice we have design the sonic the Sade the sheen and the seen okay now all of those have this one is sort of a TS a TZ Zion is Eve actually it's more of a Z then you have the S sound with the some ik the Society is the TS like as in Nets I think is the example we use on the chart the SH sound for the sheen and the S sound for the scene now there's a there's an example in the Bible I'll just go there in judges chapter 12 verse six in judges chapter 12 verse 6 where it illustrates the use of two of these sibilants some of you might remember this story in chapter 12 verse 6 it says say and they said to him say Shibboleth and he said civilus for he could not pronounce it right and then they seized him and threw him at the Fords of the Jordan at the Fords of the Jordan now the interesting thing about this particular story in the Bible is it goes back to what we talked about in terms of words that have some of the same letters but not all of the same letters here I'm going to show it to you and show you what it looks like in the Hebrew Bible so I'm going to move these down and I'll show you we have the bait all right now remember if it has this dot in the middle which is called a doggish it's going to have a hard sound it's going to be a bait instead of a V so some would count those as two letters I'm showing you that this is debate now in this particular story in judges chapter 12 verse 6 you have with the sheen on the front you're saying this is an SSH sound Shibboleth now if you were going to say Sybil left this is the letter in the Hebrew Bible notice it has three of the same letters but just by putting a different Hebrew letter on the front it changes not only the way it's pronounced but the meaning so just remember that that as you look at this and you study Hebrew you can actually begin to look at these in Scripture and you'll be able to see this for yourself so I'm going to put these letters up I'm working to improve on this little process but it's going to be helpful to be able to show you examples like this so I'm just asking people to work with me on this I think these examples that help though okay now what we want to do I'm going to put my siblings back up and we're going to talk about vowels today vowel sounds okay everyone ready to move forward in our journey into the world of Biblical Hebrew I hope so hopefully you have studied and learned many many wonderful things I do want to say thanks to those who are finding and posting on our Facebook group various apps and various websites that are helpful for people again I don't need I'm not looking for any credit so if you find something that helps you and it has nothing to do with me please post it because different people have different learning styles and I think that some of these are quite helpful Leslie showed me tonight that she has an app that really looks nice to help you quiz on letters and so forth and I'll get the name of that from her and post that for those of you who might want to download that app from the iTunes App Store okay now I mentioned last week the process of transliterating where we take a word from Hebrew and we represent that word in English characters in the example if you remember that I mentioned last week that fits whether a person is Christian or Jewish or anyone is this idea of how do you pronounce the word with which people often in their prayers alright and I used it ample when I grew up it was amen all right but those that had the great powerful prayer voice in the Southern Baptist Church that I grew up in would say it ahmein now we don't know yet because we don't have the vowels supplied from the Hebrew Bible here which you're going to learn the one of the biggest things that you're going to be able to brag about to your friends and family members is you know how to actually say that from the Hebrew Bible because these vowel sounds give us the way that we are to pronounce these words now what if you know it's it's interesting because we don't have vowels and you can't read that properly without vowels you can know some we know this doesn't have an English approximation without a vowel we do know that this is an M sound and this is an N sin we don't know the vowels now can you read English without vowels those of you who are native English speakers I think you can alright I'll give you an example could you make that out could could you make that you you would look at that and you know that it says love the Lord I could go on and write a whole verse love the Lord your God you know I could just keep on going keep going in Israel in in Hebrew modern Hebrew they use no vowels okay in the scrolls Dave I'm going to go to the scroll in a minute and I want you if you could to zoom in on that scroll for me and let's see if we can we can illustrate that I should I should tell people that if there is an unfortunate event where we lose the feed we're recording this time so we're ready okay now Dave is going to zoom in in just a moment and I want to get as tight as I can on this bottom section Dave this is from our Torah scroll here at the United Israel Center and this is opened up to what is the Torah reading for actually it was a couple of weeks ago I rolled it back to make this illustration if you notice there are no vowel points in this scroll we have the Hebrew letters this by the way is from the book of bombing Bar in Hebrew the Book of Numbers and it's it's this is what is called commonly the priestly blessing so you know the Lord bless you and keep you and so forth and so on now notice the white spacing here if you look here this is very what we would call in in English see how its squared on either side see how neat that is all the way down and then you have this white space here and then a white space and these blanks right here what's that all about one of the things that I want to talk about is Dave I'm just going to put this particular passage up and show right here now this is the Hebrew printed Bible notice that the white spaces are very much alike so you have that and then this long one here and then these shorter ones long ones shorter ones okay there are rules okay Dave good thank you there are rules associated with the writing of these scrolls and get this and bring it with me the reason that I showed you that is because you testifies to those of us who love and appreciate the biblical text it testifies to the idea that there is a very accurate transmission of the Hebrew in other words I can look at a scroll but that scroll by the way is from the 1800s I can look at that scroll and I can look at my modern Hebrew Bible printed in just the last day or so if it were that brand-new and and there are similarities like that which are very very important for us to note ok so here's here's something that I wanted to tell you this is part of the process rather than just give you grammar points it kind of helps us along the way a scribe is called in Hebrew a so fair one who counts ok so there are even rules associated with the spacing of the characters in the scroll so they have all these rules and you have to have the white spaces at a certain after this verse and we're not going to get into memorizing those but again it's about accurate transmission of the biblical text so two examples one from Judaism one from Christianity all right in Judaism this is from a document called pure chaos vote the ethics of the fathers and it says this Moses received the Torah at Sinai and handed it on to yahushua which is joshua yahushua to the elders the elders to the prophets and the prophets handed it on to the men of the great assembly so the idea is that that Torah in all its details is what was handed down and so forth and so on now Christianity has a similar passage and you guys just bear with me because I know some are Jewish summer Christian but I want to show a common point here between Judaism and Christianity in the idea about the accuracy of the text this is attributed to Jesus of Nazareth and he says for truly I say to you until heaven and earth pass away by the way it hasn't right not one jot not one tittle as the King James puts it will pass away from the taurah or the law until all is accomplished so his idea at least in this particular text is that it is valid and it is accurate and it's perfect so the point is is that the people who pass down the traditional text they maintained it with very very strict allegiance to certain uniformity in terms of transmission now we are now moving into the part of the class which deals with vowel sounds bowel sounds now I wanted to show you this but I'll show you that later in terms of how do you pronounce whether it is a man or a men as I grew up with it but I want to show you that in Hebrew now you can pull out your chart of the vowel sounds and get ready for this part of the class and I will pull out the letters which have been used at times to represent vowel sounds you didn't know this maybe and I want you to look at your chart and notice in the second column the second column I'm going to be talking about if you see the word matterr in that's a Latin word so I don't want to teach you Latin - I'll probably revise that but in according to ancient grammarians there are four Hebrew letters which became known as mothers of reading the word matterr means mother and these are those letters the olive the hay the valve and the hood yo'd these four letters according to grammarians became known as mothers of reading they possessed vowel power so I showed you a moment ago Dave zoomed in and we looked at the scroll there are no vowels in there so how do we pronounce how do we know how to pronounce these words these are very important in the development of the language according to the grammarians now if you haven't heard this before in English we have something similar with our letter Y the letter Y in English can be used as a consonant as in yes or a vowel as in Kelly and so it has this dual power this dual purpose so this particular phenomenon in the Hebrew is not just specific to Hebrew but other related languages according to jessenia s' the one of the great grammarians makes this point very clearly that you ger it Moabite Arabic certain Phoenician languages Aramaic and Syriac all possess these letters that have this vowel power these mothers of reading so here you have four letters that represent the mothers of reading now I wanted to add this in because I think it's an interesting point it's from the book of Josephus and Josephus says the following in book 5 chapter 5 he talking about four letters that are very important and I want to talk about this a little bit he says that he's talking in context about the high priest the high priest in the ancient world of Israel and it says a miter a headgear also a fine linen encompassed his head which was tied by a blue ribbon about which there was another golden crown in which was engraving the sacred name we're talking about God's name right it consists of four vowels well what does he mean by that because we don't have vowels we've learned that we have 22 consonants but here's something interesting in Hebrew the name of God and I won't get into a debate of will I will I love debates but I won't do it in this class because this class is to teach you Biblical Hebrew so or how to read it so I'm going to show you that Josephus just told us that the name of God consists of four vowels all right now if the name of God does not have the olives in it but it has the good it has the yo the hey the valve and the hey and notice that God's name is composed of four letters and all of these letters are these vowel letters now people get into debates and fights over how to pronounce the name I'm not interested in that debate in this particular class but what I did want to tell you is that this is the sacred name of the creator according to the Hebrew Bible now you would think that it would show up a lot of times right in English Bibles it doesn't occur in fact it's confusing because we see Lord Lord Lord all the time but we don't see this King James I think retained a form of their interpretation of the name three or four times but so here's something to think about according to the Jewish people the name is not pronounced notice I said it's got four letters we can all count it's called the tetragrammaton all right it occurs nearly 7,000 times in the Hebrew Bible and quite often in English translations you will see this name instead of brought into English you'll see capital L Ord and not a name that's a title that's not the name I just wanted to make that clear in fact whenever a Orthodox person a Jewish person read scripture and they encounter the divine name the name which is above all when they see this they will say ad doe Knight it won't pronounce the name they'll say ad all night if they're talking in conversation they will say Hashem Hashem is Hebrew and it means the name okay D name again Josephus says that it's made of four vowels and I will tell you this if you've ever heard the pronunciation this is not intended to offend anyone who thinks that this is wrong to pronounce but the the way that they come up with the pronunciation a lot of people will say these are pronounced as valves so they go e-i-e-i-o-e-o yahweh that's how we get the name yahweh okay so that's just for your instruction I'm not advancing that pronunciation just wanted to make that point now why is this important I'm not here to teach theology but I want to show you the beauty of learning Hebrew Psalm 110 and you can look at this on your own but in Psalm 110 it's says the Lord all right in verse 1 the Lord capital lor Dee said unto my lord capital l little o little R little D the Lord hear in Hebrew is this name said unto my master this word means master ok so you can see those kind of things whereas in English you simply read in the text and you go oh the Lord said unto my lord lord lord you get two Lords here but in Hebrew it reflects something totally different and that's why I think that this is so essential for us to consider what it is that we're actually seeing when we peer past the English and see the Hebrew here's another one in Joel chapter 2 verse 32 Joel chapter 2 verse 32 it says in English all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved but in Hebrew it says all who call upon the name and it shows the divine name the tetragrammaton so it becomes essential for us to know exactly what it is that we're looking at and you being able to look at the Hebrew will allow you to do that without having to take someone's word for it these are just some of the examples that are thought of now we we have this careful transmission of the text to consider I showed you a scroll that dates back to the 1800s and the scroll looks like very much like a very recently printed Hebrew text the beauty is is that when we go to Scrolls that were discovered in antiquity such as at Qumran the Dead Sea Scrolls many people have heard about those quite often we find not only that the text matches but even the white spaces last year they discovered a fragment of a book from the Torah of Moses and it actually had the same white spaces as are found in a modern scroll or a modern text as I showed you just a few moments ago remember a so ferry scribe is one who counts very meticulously counts and then you'll recall in Deuteronomy 4:2 in Deuteronomy 13 1 it says not to add to or to take away from so this is what's interesting if you can't add to that how can you convey the proper pronunciation in other words you have these vowels sounds the question became how do we represent the vowel sounds without adding to the text so I'll give you another example in English I'm going to put the Tetragrammaton back up and I want to use my example again so that we can make this point in English and I'll show you the reason it's important to learn the vowels that we're going to be going over okay if for instance we were faced with the same issue that we have in the Hebrew I have this that we did earlier love the Lord all right now if I were trying to preserve this let's say that maybe there was a chance that English pronunciation would be lost over the next several generations and I came up with this interesting way to preserve the pronunciation but I had a very tight stricture so let's say I come up with this way and I bring people in and I say you're not gonna believe this watch this I'm going to add some of the sounds so that people know how to pronounce it and that's a great idea in it but but what if I had a rule in place that said you can't add to the count a scribe is a so fair one who counts if I didn't watch this if I just count the black the original text I've got one two three four five six seven so I've got seven letters that I'm looking for as a scribe but when I add the vowels now I have one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven seven eleven that that that works out good I wasn't trying to talk about the story here but notice the distinction between the two now this is a problem so what did they do they couldn't add two so they couldn't make characters like this they had to represent the vowel sounds through symbols that didn't add characters okay so in the sixth to seventh century of the Common Era Christians would refer to this as ad there was a system devised whereby the proper pronunciation could be inserted into a text not a Torah scroll but into a traditional Hebrew text without increasing the count and that's what we're dealing with now these characters signs are represented for you in my chart the Hebrew vowel sounds chart okay now what I want to do is tell you that these sounds have been preserved throughout the generations and this is passed down I'll get into more detail as we move forward but for now the symbols that we're going to talk about you'll see and we'll tell you the English approximation what I'd like you to focus on for right now is the form notice this second to the last column in the vowel sounds chart here's what we're going to do and I have to give a shout out to my very good friend longtime friend Kevin Brown who saw me last week he's the only one that saw sherry and Kevin were the only ones who saw my class the rest of the world didn't get to see it right lesson so but Kevin saw me struggling because I was trying to write the vowel sounds like this yes this is what I was doing last week I would draw that vowel sound and people on line can't see that so Kevin said why are you doing that why don't you let why don't you make and then he said let me do it for you so look at this now right so thank you Kevin because this is what I needed to instruct people on the vowel sounds okay now what I want you to do is is as we work through this you're going to get some instructions some basic instruction on how to actually pronounce syllables we're going to get more into making syllables and pronouncing words next week but this is an example remember when I said that the olive has no phonetic approximation most charts will just say no sound all right but it actually takes the sound of the vowel sign which is a sign to it so now if I look at this this has no sound but I put under it look at your chart what is this vowel sound called it's called a commit right a comments it makes the sound of ah so now when I look at this consonant and vowel sign make a syllable ah all right very easy very easy and if I put another letter now these are not words I'm just showing this for illustrating a certain right if I put a Zion with this particular vowel sign a comment it's za alright you read the consonant with the attached vowel sign see there you're already reading Hebrew stick with me alright don't want to go too deep with it right now but just to make the point okay so if you look at this chart most grammars most grammars will make a big deal out of telling you don't think in terms of English vowels I'm dealing with english-speaking people and while I may not be the best Hebrew teacher and I may not be an academically approved whatever I have to think in terms that I know and as a teacher I think why would you not reach people and show them close approximation so that it helps them move faster into the language so you'll notice on this chart that I have the vowel sound starting from left to right I have the vowel sound ayyy I owe you now some grammars are starting to do this now some of the older school Hebrew grammarians will say don't associate it with things look here's the deal you have vowel sound signs that make these following sounds ah eh eh ooh I mean that's pretty much a e i o u so I'm not going to introduce you to something and not give you a tool so here it is we have the vowel sound we have the ma ter the mother the mother of reading these are those for Ebru letters that are used for a dual purpose then the Hebrew name which you'll be able to read on your own later the name in English this is called what do we call this transliteration where if you look at the Hebrew name for the first vowel son right here you'll see it says commit and in the Hebrew name says that as well so in English comments that's a that's an approximation of what the Hebrew it's a transliteration of what the Hebrew letters are saying so you follow it along you'll see the next column is after name long or short you just are going to need to know don't worry about the way that a long or short sounds because you might be confused but learn the name and whether it's long or short and especially the form right now to read it you have to know how it sounds so this is an important process that we'll have to work through and we intend to do just that let me add this one of the things that I learned from the grammarian by the name of jessenia s' now I'm not recommending this book unless you just really really love dense hard lots of footnotes it's not that it's not the textbook for people who just want to jump in and get a basic understanding but if you love a very well-documented and thorough grammar better take you the rest of your life to work through then by all means get it here's what I did learn that was worth passing on to beginners he says that most of the names of the Hebrew vowel sounds most of the names are are based on their stressing the form and action of the mouth okay in pronouncing the sound all right let me give you an example excuse me now watch this look at the next on your chart you'll see that Hebrew vowel sound all right what's that one called it's called a pataga okay now in Hebrew this patate that word means opening are open so how do you pronounce it ah open your mouth and say ah you see so these the names of these vowels mostly represent the way that the mouth is formed when making the sound I'm not going to go through all of them but that is a way to explain that and you can look up more information again I want to give you just enough and not too much information to get you to the point where you can read so now believe it or not you will be introduced to reading right be introduced to reading a few of these easy words and I just want to give you a couple of examples all right now in order for you to follow along you need to know that Hebrew is read from right to left and English readers read from left to right so the first thing you have to do is flip that around and understand that you're reading from right to left and I will illustrate this on the board understand that what I'm telling you in these early lessons there are some exceptions but I'm not not in the right-to-left thing don't get don't get too excited there but what I want to do is I want to give you the rule generally like you're going to see this say ninety something percent of the time and and then other times you'll learn exceptions as you get more into the grammar so remember that we have two letters in Hebrew that according to our consonant chart have no phonetic approximation the olive and the I n all right now we're just going to spell a couple of words just so that you can see how Hebrew works all right now what are these two consonants you can just answer to yourself we don't know how to pronounce that at this point now again I'm going to talk more about making syllables next week so if you know a little bit more Hebrew than a very beginning place you might be wondering he needs to talk about open and closed syllables and all that not yet I'm going to do that in the next little while I have no idea how to pronounce this word Dave because I have a consonant that has no phonetic approximation I know the ending sound is going to be the but if I put this on the board this forms a syllable and it actually makes a word now I told you that we read from right to left so we would start with this continent and then we would move to this one but we need a vowel sound so we're going to pick up this vowel sign along the way and then we're going to catch that last syllable so it's like this how do I pronounce this you can't but if it has a vowel sound sign attached to it we know that it is ah so I go um Bob you see that now in Hebrew this spells something this spells the Hebrew word of which I just said and it means father of father sometimes you you may have heard of ABBA okay it's a variation of this same idea of okay now I'm working through we'll see if I work through all I probably won't work through all of them but I'll give you a couple of examples of words that you might have heard and you'll see I just started with the first form which is the Komets right and I just showed you that that's the the letter there now let's look at let me think of a good one because I love it when you see a word that you know already I know you know this word you don't know you know this word yet you don't know you know this word right okay so here's what we have we have three Hebrew letters the olive the Dalit and the mem suffit or the final MIM so I don't know how to pronounce this there's no English approximation I know that this is a D sound and this is an M sound okay now in order to pronounce it correctly I need to put some vowel sounds on it so if I put you know what this is I'm going to let you I'm not even going to say I want you to look at your chart and find this vowel sound and see if you can find it on your chart give you a couple of seconds give me time to get a drink of coffee we need some yeah like jeopardy dun dun dun dun dun sent okay so here what do we have we have the olive with the AH okay ah now you're going to have a second syllable which we'll talk about syllables later but it's going to be ah [Music] and then a mmm sound okay there you go look at that you've been sandbagging you already knew how to do this you're auditing this class that's great that is excellent it's a dumb-dumb now again when we see in English when we look at the Hebrew when we look at our English Bible we read a story very early on in the Bible about Adam Adam and Eve and you know we have this okay so this is what we call transliteration it's where we take a Hebrew word and we put it in English letters so is his name we I grew up and I heard Adam all right and you know people can debate exact approach you know exactly but in Hebrew if you look at the chart we would say a dumb a dumb now you say tomato I say tomato it becomes important in certain situations but I just want to stress that go with what we're learning from the chart and again I talked to an Israeli this morning and and she told me look you said this and you need to work a little bit on this pronoun but that's great I want that help I'm going to give you as close as I can get with the southern Louisiana spin and what I've learned in books and hearing some but this is what we're going to do so we look at the syllables we look at how to pronounce it and this is an example of how to read Hebrew now I'm going to give you a couple more just so that you get some more practice and then I want you to be thinking about that this week and you know if you really get into this I've posted on our Facebook group page quite a bit I posted the first two sheets worth of vocabulary words so that you can go and start practicing reading these words because what I want to do over the next couple of weeks you're going to get a example after example after example to read and those charts will be quite helpful okay so well let me let me take some of these letters back and I want to pull up something here and let's see and we're getting close to wrapping things up but I want you to stay with me just a moment so that I can use this example on the board okay now we talked earlier in the class I think I'll go ahead and do this example to round things out so that you won't think I lied to you which would be horrible for you to think this is a word that you know I like using words that you know you may not know that you know it but you might not know how to pronounce it we don't know how to pronounce this because olive doesn't have an English approximation we know that this is what found an M sound right it's a mem and then we have the final noon okay so what I need to do is add a couple of vowels to it so that you can pronounce it this is so fun and I'm so excited that you are becoming proficient at reading Biblical Hebrew you didn't even think you would get this far tonight okay now you have to look at your chart and I want you to look at the first vowel sound son and that is the comments right so this is an awesome and then notice that one it's got the two dots side-by-side it's called a say ray and it has the a sound all right a sound as in AI like way neighbor a why so if I look at this word I can now assign a power of vocal here so this is ah this is my M sound this together is M and this is an A and a noon ah mmm main ah main main now when I started I talked about whether you pronounce it as a men are our main this is the way you'll see it written in the Hebrew Bible and the first time it's used in scripture is the book of numbers or bunny bar chapter five and verse 22 and with that main concludes prayers quite often and today it concludes class number two so I would ask you this week to go over the Hebrew letter chart again and write the letters continue to practice writing the letters but now you've got a little bit more work because I want you to really learn these vowel sound signs learn the name learn the form learn the pronoun pronunciation and again you can begin to download some of these various apps on the the stores the iTunes Store and so forth because I want you to get plenty of practice now we're going to talk more about making syllables and so forth we have some other vowel signs but thanks to my friend Kevin I have all of those here in my case and he did a good job we're going to practice over the next couple of weeks I'll introduce you to a few small grammar points that you have to have to read but what I'm really going to be focused on is going through apples like this and I'm going to put it on the board and I'm going to try to use examples that I think you know so for instance I'm going to take names like Abraham and and that's a transliterated word right it's a word that came and I'm going to put that name in Hebrew letters and put the vowel points below it so that you have to pronounce it according to the chart and you'll be reading it as you would see it in the actual Hebrew Bible again my goal is to get you to the point as soon as possible that you can pick up a Hebrew Bible and you can identify clearly what the text is saying and then you can use various tools to look up you know a dictionaries lexicons that kind of thing so I mean I mean have a wonderful week spend plenty of time on the Facebook group page discussing talking learning with one another thank you so much for joining us today feel free to share this video and invite others who might want to learn Biblical Hebrew and we'll see you next week Shalom Shalom you

Channel: Just another YouTube channel

Views: 3,877

Rating: 4.8481011 out of 5

Keywords: Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Class, hebrew, Ross

Id: t46e_skZYyE

Length: 65min 55sec (3955 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2017