Mine is going to have some...
I have an old "Teach Yourself Hebrew" book for starters, (looks considerably smaller than Weingreen. I promise I'll watch out for "w"s - it seems to have them) and I need to understand all Gesenius' grammar notes. Also Young's concordance notes, which I know many prefer to Strong's. After that, my HALOT should turn up. then we'll see. But to be honest, chances are that my next purchase would more likely be a click-through program. Unfortunately, my pronunciation will not be a problem, unless I end up like a guy I used to know who who for some years lived next door to a Rabbi. He called his house "Ha Tikvah" (The Hope) and by this strategy he managed to divert a number of the Rabbi's intended visitors to his own front door, and so over the years entertained a number of Jews who he would not otherwise have had the opportunity to meet.
I tried to learn Greek, and just about when I was about to give up, the lecturer told us that if we had learned Hebrew instead trying to learn Greek, we would have been reading the OT by that stage - I remember thinking that he might have mentioned that earlier. I would definitely have been more interested in some Bible topics than Greek battles. Anyway I will see how the Hebrew goes.
Thank you very much indeed for all your recommendations.
shalom
Hey that's great you have a book already.
Funny story with "Ha Tikvah" very clever. That's also the name of the Israeli national anthem.
Well in my opinion, if one picks a single phase of Biblical Hebrew to master, like the 5 books of Moses, and you compared the effort needed to master most of that grammar to what is necessary to master the grammar of the New Testament Greek; I agree. Greek grammar will be harder.
On the flip side, if one's goal is to master all the phases of Biblical Hebrew's grammar (ignoring the Aramaic sections of the OT), including Psalms and wisdom literature (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, etc) then I think the Hebrew would take more time. It's just that the New Testament, fortunately, was written in such a fast snapshot of time (several decades) vs an eon+ to write the OT in entirety. There's just so many strange things that happen: Phoenician 3rd person suffixes which look like Hebrew 1st person suffixes that show up in wisdom literature confusing people with changes from 3rd to 1st person, "Old" Canaanite (meaning it was Old at that time) forms showing up in poetry with what looks like feminine 3rd person endings to Hebrew verbs when really they were masculine endings in old Canaanite [
qatala forms], Aramaic influences to Hebrew grammar from the time in captivity, old Accusative / Genitive / Dative forms left over from "Ancient" Hebrew which pop up sometimes used correctly, sometimes incorrectly understood by the authors themselves who seem to be trying to sound "archaic" with their poetry, "double duty" suffixes where one word in a sentence will have a suffix "yours" "Mine" etc. and the writer poetically intended to apply it to another word in the sentence as well, etc.
In addition we have Israelite and Judean dialects as well as Ugaritic forms creeping their influence in.
I'm not trying to scare you, I'm just commenting on the "which grammar is harder Hebrew or Greek".
I think to generalize it's safe to say Greek grammar is "harder" for people who have never studied a language with case endings (Latin, German, Slovik languages, Finnish, Hungarian, etc...) because that's a huge concept hurdle for English speakers to get over. Syntax is harder in Hebrew in my opinion when you take the entire OT into context. As far as vocabulary goes, with Greek an English speaker starts off with a huge vocabulary they often didn't know they have.
kardia (heart)
derma (skin)
sofia (wisdom)
philo (friend/love) i.e. philosophy, etc.
There's just a huge amount of influence on English from Greek so we are blessed with hundreds of cognates we can leverage for learning words. With Hebrew, not so much so. Also Hebrew words are usually much shorter which doesn't always lend itself to certain memory tricks.
That said, with Hebrew, after you learn the grammar for verbal forms for example, you can often explode your vocabulary by learning 1 root meaning of a simple verb. Then when you see one of the 6 other verbal forms, you apply your grammar rules and can often extrapolate a meaning. So in essence, you often can get 7+ words learned for the price of 1!!!
There's some such trickery in Greek too but it's not nearly as reliable or predictable as with Hebrew.
Hebrew, however, is definitely much easier to break into in my opinion. You can study for a year and find yourself reading large chunks of the Exodus story; it's really quite wonderful. To pray in Hebrew is a great feeling; I've prayed in Greek before (was in the zone) and it didn't feel as amazing as praying in the
lāšōn hakōdeš (holy tongue).
OK sorry if I got rambling; I love it when folks learn Hebrew.
One last thing I usually encourage people to think about which book(s) of the OT are their favorite; i.e. which would they most enjoy reading in Hebrew. Then, instead of the usual drudgery of learning all the words that occur more than X times in the entire bible, etc. I have them focus on the book(s) they want to master.
Even if it's just a single Psalm there is something very empowering about being able to read that 1 psalm with understanding or that 1 chapter from exodus with understanding.
shalom
