Using Hebrew in Pastoral Ministry III

Why do I need to work with the Hebrew when I can never do it as well as the 'professionals?'

This is perhaps the strongest reason for not keeping up with Hebrew – the investments seem huge and the pay-off seems minimal. I can spend 4 years studying at college, a chunk of time each week keeping it up but when I come to work on the text for a sermon I can barely do more than produce a basic translation. I am still heavily reliant on commentaries for serous insight. Why keep going? Let me give you several reasons why I intend to keep going:

-I think my Hebrew is actually getting (very slowly) better with use. Certainly reading regularly means I can read more fluently. At college I tended to concentrate on getting to know our set-texts in detail, but I am now reading a little more widely and my fluency is (very slowly!) improving.

-Even if my Hebrew is still pretty rudimentary, the tools for serious engagement are there – that is the potential to evaluate the insights of commentaries.

-In practice I read the Hebrew in parallel with the English – and rely on the English. However, I use the Hebrew to check insights I gain from reading the English. So, I recently preached a sermon on Jeremiah 30. Reading the English I noticed the repetition of first person verbs from the Lord's perspective. For example:

v8: I will break his yoke from off your neck, and I will burst your bonds, and foreigners shall no more make a servant of him. 9 But they shall serve the LORD their God and David their king, whom I will raise up for them.

I got quite excited about this and was ready to go to town on it in my sermon. However, a very quick scan of the Hebrew showed me that the personal pronoun (for emphasis) was only used a couple of times throughout the chapter. While it is still true that the LORD is the subject of most of the verbs, the Hebrew is not quite as strong as I thought the English was.

So, in short my interaction with the Hebrew is not particularly profound, but it is something that I want to continue to develop and something that I think is already and will continue to be valuable.

Next time: Some conclusions...

Using Hebrew in Pastoral Ministry II

I am too busy and Hebrew is too difficult to maintain after college.

Hebrew is a difficult language to keep up. I am not speaking from a great deal of experience being only out of college a few months, but the following are ideas that I have heard from others or am intending to follow myself:

i. Most importantly be convinced it is important. Perhaps this post is in the wrong place as we haven't dealt with all the objections yet, but unless you are convinced that it is worth keeping up with Hebrew you never will.

ii. Practically, I think 'little and often' is the key. I have worked out that I have about 15 minutes a day to keep up my Hebrew, so I try and read as much as I can in that length of time. But however much time you have, it seems better to do it every day than just reading big chunks once a week say. I also try and read aloud which helps with my concentration.

iii.One of the books that I have been most excited to buy this year is the Reader's Hebrew Bible. This contains the text of the BHS but footnotes every word that occurs less than 100 times in the Hebrew Bible. This has two advantages. Firstly, it means that you can read the Hebrew text without constantly looking up a lexicon. The editors label the footnotes as 'glosses' – which they are. And they emphasise that they should not be used instead of lexica for detailed exegetical work. Secondly, when you come across a word that does not have a footnote, it means that you should know it. This forces you to pause and try and remember the word rather than simply looking it up. Words that appear more than 100 times are listed in an appendix and as there are only about 500 (?) of them, this is a manageable amount of vocab to maintain.

Using Hebrew in the Pastoral Ministry I

Questions are frequently raised about the value of Hebrew for the Pastoral ministry (see for example the debate here). The pain of learning Hebrew is thought too high for the limited gains that a busy Pastor can draw form working with the OT Hebrew.

I thought over the next few posts I would address three reasons that we might think like this.

Firstly, at the most fundamental level, some might argue that since the NT is the final revelation of God, the 'shadowy' OT is of limited value – and with it the study of Hebrew. Now that we have the superior NT we don't need the OT (good as it may have been at the time). So, I know one well known preacher who never preaches on the OT. He doesn't deny that the OT is the word of God but argues that since we are NT Christians, he should concentrate his efforts on the NT. Now, I imagine that very few evangelicals would express it this way, but nevertheless this can be our underlying, sub-conscious attitude to the OT. The NT is where the action is and we preach the OT occasionally to ease our consciences. However, it is worth reminding ourselves that when Paul says this he had the OT in mind:

2 Tim3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Now, the NT is Scripture too and brings all of these benefits, but the OT – on its own if you like - is able to thoroughly equip us for every good work. And if we don't have that conviction about the OT then we will never give it the place it deserves.

Further, the OT does give us so much value that we would lose if we only preached from the NT. It is not so much that the OT gives us anything we would lack if we didn't have it. Rather, I think, it fleshes out and exemplifies much of what the NT teaches.

Take the example of Romans 6:22 But now [...] you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God.

You get much of the same imagery in Jeremiah 30:8-9

8 "And it shall come to pass in that day, declares the LORD of hosts, that I will break his yoke from off your neck, and I will burst your bonds, and foreigners shall no more make a servant of him. 9 But they shall serve the LORD their God and David their king, whom I will raise up for them.

But why preach on these verses when you have Romans 6:22? Well, the problem is that when we read of being enslaved to God in Romans 6 it can evoke a negative image to us because of contemporary examples of slavery or because of our post-modern distaste for authority. But actually it is Jeremiah – who expands on what slavery actually looks like, who helps us to understand it:

10 "Then fear not, O Jacob my servant, declares the LORD nor be dismayed, O Israel; for behold, I will save you from far away, and your offspring from the land of their captivity. Jacob shall return and have quiet and ease, and none shall make him afraid.

You see being God's slave is not a negative thing. It is not what we would describe as servitude – it is not slavery in the modern sense at all– no it is a life of quiet, of ease of not being made afraid. It is a life verse with God on our side to save us. It is being in a relationship with God where he makes an end of our enemies. Jeremiah helps us see what a positive thing slavery to God is. That it is more the idea of being bound to someone in a dependent relationship rather than being mistreated and cruelly worked to death. I think Paul expected his readers to read his words on slavery with an OT understanding. So the OT and the NT complement each other so well that we can't neglect the OT without impoverishing our understanding.

Next time, we will get down to the nitty-gritty of using Hebrew: I am too busy and Hebrew is too difficult