אבנימ

Biblical Hermeneutics Part First Chapter 4

In this chapter the author introduces us to Hebrew, the language of most of the Old Testament. He discusses the origin of the language and its name, and the distinctive features which make it so particularly suitable for the inspired writings.

Hebrew was the language of Abraham, and likely derived its name from his forbear Eber, the great-grandson of Shem, from whom the language may be descended. The alphabet consists of all consonants, which originally represented the things denoted by their names, e.g. Aleph – ox, Beth – house, Gimel – camel, Daleth – door, etc. The vowel pointings were added by the Masoretes circa A.D. 700 to preserve the correct pronunciation of the language. It particularly served the long process of divine inspiration that Hebrew remained constant and substantially unchanged from the time of Moses to that of Malachi. Upon the completion of the Hebrew canon, it ceased to be a living language and hence was preserved intact.

Hebrew is a primitive tongue, and reflects a mind and heart in many ways foreign to the west. Among its unique characteristics are that all verb stems consist of three letters, and that the tenses in Hebrew have less to do with actual time than they do with the perspective and mood of the speaker. For gender, all nouns are either masculine or feminine, and for number the plural often denotes something other than plurality, e.g. vastness, greatness, majesty, as in ha shamayim. Many sentences have a subject and a predicate, but no connecting verb, e.g. Ps. 64.3 “How fearful your doings.”?

Nearly half of the Hebrew Scriptures are written in a poetic style, though not necessarily poems, per se. Hebrew poetry is not limited or restricted by meter or rhyme, but its genius is rather in the forms of simple, strong phrases, grouped in parallel lines. The broad categories of parallelism in Hebrew poetry are the Synonymous, the Antithetical, and the Synthetic. The elevated and expressive styles in these forms have shown themselves to be the ideal instruments for God to communicate his prophetic message to the ancient world through Israel, and to all mankind since.