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October 22, 2007
Ancient Hebrew as a "Cultural Priority?"
John Hobbins of Ancient Hebrew Poetry has a dream,
It goes like this. The day is coming when ancient Hebrew will be widely taught at the high school and college levels in private and public institutions.
And after defining what he means by ancient Hebrew (the Hebrew of the Bible, but also epigraphic Hebrew, the Hebrew of Ben Sira, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Talmud, and the piyyutim) and noting that it is taught at the elementary school level in "orthodox Jewish settings," and that Greek and Latin are sometimes taught in public and private secondary schools, he turns to a marketing question,
Is there a demand? There would be if it sunk in that learning Hebrew, the foundational language of the Bible and the Talmud, is a cultural priority.
The remainder of his discussion is interesting and I'll take up a small part of it in a while, but now I want to focus on three words in the quotation above: "a cultural priority."
Is learning ancient Hebrew a cultural priority or, more to my point, should it be? My own view is that learning statistics and probability theory is a far higher cultural priority than learning ancient Hebrew. Unless there is a broader general knowledge of stochastic processes, culture as we know it is likely to end in political paralysis. Nearly all the pressing issues from global warming to health care policy depend on at least a general understanding of statistics. None of them depends on wide spread knowledge of ancient Hebrew.
If we are talking about our cultural heritage (I'm referring here to the cultural heritage of Western Civilization but John may have a narrower theological or religious heritage in mind), and are thinking only in terms of languages, I would put knowledge of Latin, Greek, German and French well above knowledge of ancient Hebrew in any prioritized list. And while my knowledge of these languages is uneven (nearly nonexistent in the case of Latin), if I were planning a cultural heritage curriculum based on language alone, I would put knowledge of all four of these languages (plus English) taken as a group ahead of knowledge of ancient Hebrew. I would even put Italian and Spanish ahead of ancient Hebrew. If I were developing a language curriculum to address the short-term issues of modern cultural, I would put Mandarin and Arabic well ahead of ancient Hebrew. I'd even put modern Hebrew well ahead of ancient Hebrew.
Now, this doesn't mean that I think ancient Hebrew should not be taught even at the high school level when and where there is demand. Ancient Hebrew is undeniably a part of the Jewish cultural heritage and therefore part of the heritage of Western Civilization more generally. One can argue the importance of ancient Hebrew to Christianity and I think that importance is often overstated but it is far from nothing. In so far as Judaism and Christianity make sense, the study of ancient Hebrew within those traditions makes sense. But even there, I wonder if it is as important as is sometimes thought. I enjoy ancient Hebrew and try to read some everyday. In addition to the enhancing the cultural significance of the literature written in ancient Hebrew, for me it was also the gateway language to Ugaritic and Akkadian with their many treasures. Incidentally, Arabic would have been a somewhat better gateway language for the study of Ugaritic and Akkadian. But supplemented by a little, and I do mean a little, Arabic, ancient Hebrew has serviced me well.
What I'm saying is that ancient Hebrew is not of major importance as a cultural priority outside of a rather narrow set of traditions. And as such, it is limited to the concerns of those traditions. But John is correct when he suggests,
Quite apart from religious or anti-religious leanings, learning Hebrew might just be a geeky thing to do.
It is true that even low priority languages have some priority and I certainly wouldn't mind if more people knew ancient Hebrew. Among other things, I think that greater knowledge of ancient Hebrew, particularly if read with in the context of other ancient literatures, would reduce the widespread abuse of the texts originally written in that language. I also think a widespread knowledge of ancient Hebrew might increase the traffic on my blog. Talk about a cultural priority.
Posted by Duane Smith at October 22, 2007 7:42 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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Comments
Perhaps, if the concept of 'cultural priority' was defined prescriptively rather than descriptively, more space could be made for the priority of biblical Hebrew over the languages you cite. I say this, not so much as a Christian who thinks that intensified contact with the Old Testament would lead to a sort of cultural renewal, but as someone who observes the inner logic of a historical Christianity which has shaped large chunks of our cultural landscape. This heritage is not a static deposit, preserved in languages such as Greek, Latin or Hebrew, but an ongoing struggle to understand ourselves and the world. Whether a secular society likes or not, this particular struggle - i.e. the struggle of the church - has got us to where we are today. Part of that struggle was trying to understand the God of the church in relation to ("in accordance with") the Hebrew Scriptures. Acquaintance with these scriptures (which entails the language in which they were written) would be to genuinely participate in our cultural heritage, rather then to just document and describe it. The consequences of not doing so could at best lead to cultural stagnation.
Posted by: Philip Sumpter at October 23, 2007 1:20 AM
Thanks, Duane, for talking up this issue.
I concur with a number of your observations. A better idea of the broader priorities in my family may be gleaned by what what my son Giovanni, a junior in high school, is up to. He's bilingual Italian-English, has begun Latin, German, and Spanish, and will be taking a philosophy course next semester at a nearby Catholic college for high school credit. Now he wants to learn Hebrew, too.
I also concur with your remarks about the importance of math and science. But I'll stop wandering here and there for the moment.
Thanks again.
Posted by: John Hobbins at October 23, 2007 5:40 AM
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