A Pedagogical Approach to Teaching Biblical Hebrew in American Day Schools

ABSTRACT

This conceptual paper lays out an approach to teaching biblical Hebrew in American day schools. This paper builds on extant work in the field of Jewish education on teaching biblical Hebrew and offers day school educators a theory of language instruction for teaching biblical Hebrew.

KEYWORDS:

• Hebrew Bible
• Biblical Hebrew
• language instruction
• literacy
• Jewish day school

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ There exist additional resources for high school and college-age students. For example, see Brettler’s (2002) Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Hebrew.

² Jewish education is not alone in attempting to navigate the pedagogical tensions between sacred and vernacular dialects. Scholars in the emerging field of full-time Muslim day schools also group modern Arabic and Koranic Arabic together. For example, Al Akloby and Yucel (2018) wrote in their study of Arabic curricula, “Arabic is not just the language of the sacred texts of Islam but also the language of a civilization. To Muslims, the importance of Arabic is second only to that of religion” (p. 34). The hope to teach spoken Arabic and Koranic Arabic reflects similar goals in Jewish education in teaching modern Hebrew and biblical Hebrew.

³ For example, biblical Hebrew instruction and resources found a new form in the Ivrit b’ Ivrit movement (see, e.g., Krasner, 2011; Sarna, 1998). Yael Zielenziger (1989) documents how Ivrit b’ Ivrit Hebrew Bible education focused on modern Hebrew, not biblical Hebrew, and how it amended biblical texts to give them a Zionist spin that would reflect the “health and normalcy of the life of a people in their homeland” (Zielenziger, 1989, p. 34).

⁴ In this article I have purposefully chosen to use the term ”literacy practices,” a concept utilized in much of the early work in New Literacy Studies (Baynham, 1995; Scribner & Cole, ; Street, 1984).

⁵ The term תחליות also shows up in the LeHavin U'Lehaskel workbooks but its components are organized differently than they are here.

⁶ Again, the term כינונים also shows up in the LeHavin U'Lehaskel workbooks but its components are organized differently than they are here.

⁷ Penny Schine Gold (2004) in her book, Making the Bible Modern, argues (and documents with compelling evidence) that American Jewish educators and administrators have been changing and truncating the Bible since the beginning of the twentieth century. Following in the American public schooling tradition of focusing on moral education, American Jews of the early twentieth century sought to similarly focus Bible education on morals. Schine Gold writes, “To adapt the Bible to the purpose of moral education, two operations were required: reshaping the form of the text into ‘stories’ and bringing the substance of the text into consonance with modern moral sensibilities” (p. 102). The literal words on the page of the biblical text were a danger to the educational endeavor.

⁸ These observations follow Trible's observation in Texts of Terror (Trible, 1984).

⁹ I am using The Contemporary Torah (JPS, 2006) translation, but there are many alternative translations that preserve the form of the Hebrew (e.g., Robert Alter, Everett Fox, etc.). I am using The Contemporary Torah (JPS, 2006) translation primarily because it is found on Sefaria.org, a common resource used in classrooms today. To be clear, the issue is not about better or worse translations, or which translations we find on Sefaria.org, but rather what is inevitably lost in translation.