Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- for more practice

And that’s my version of how Biblical Hebrew grammar works.

 

I know I probably didn’t discuss everything you will see in classical Hebrew literature.  Email me when you find something I didn’t cover.

 

If you want to check up on whether I can support what I say for more material, you want to read my book Narrating the Torah.  When I started it, I was simply trying to show all the ways in which Axel Olrik’s Principles for Oral Narrative Research showed up in Torah, hence the title.

 

When I discovered Dr. Cook’s dissertation over 10 years after studying Olrik, I immediately realized that they dovetailed, with respect to the certainty/evidentiary epistemic and Olrik’s localization.  So I started rewriting Narrating.  I just finished the second draft of this rewrite.

 

Narrating gives the entire Torah.  Then it has an English translation which reflects the issues I’ve discussed on this blog.  It’s not your grandfather’s translation.  So if you need to replace an old translation of Torah, buy a reprint of the same thing. 

 

If you want practice reading Torah in Hebrew, go to one of the sites listed in the Fact-Checking Resources page, where you will find the Torah with vowels and chant markings.  This is probably what you should do before you buy Narrating so that you don’t get overwhelmed by detail.

 

Narrating can be overwhelming because there is so much to comment on from a language point of view, as you have seen on this blog over the last eleven months.  Plus it analyzes the material based on Olrik’s principles, which can also run fairly long.  Finally, it repeats and sometimes expands on archaeological issues I raise on the Fact-Checking page of this blog. 

 

So use the free versions of Torah online and work up to reading one parshah a week, which you can do by reading one aliyah a day.  (The material is sectioned by aliyah, with square brackets that show which aliyah starts where.)  Try going to the Jewish calendar on www.chabad.org, to find out on which day next autumn a new Torah reading cycle starts, and keep up with it. 

 

When you’re done, you can buy a copy of Narrating, which is only available from me, and start over again.  And when you’re done reading that for the first time, you will have learned so much that you will have new questions about what you read at the start.  So go back and start over.  The rabbis say, “Turn it over and over, you will never get to the end of it.”

 

Which is what I discovered, all over again, after reading Dr. Cook’s dissertation and then studying Arabic.

A little advice, and we're done.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved