Hebrew: A great language to learn

Hebrew: A great language to learn

Renee EllisonAug 17, '22

If you are wondering what foreign language to teach your children, you need look no further than Hebrew.  In the early years of Harvard, as a college, every student had to learn Hebrew in order to graduate.  It was considered that important to true scholarship and the optimal development of the mind.

Since Hebrew is the eternal language of God, any study of it is never a waste of time, because it will last forever.  All other languages will eventually pass away.  Hebrew is the language the Almighty Himself used when He spoke to Moses at Mt. Sinai (otherwise Moses wouldn’t have understood Him).  The very name He told Moses, YHWH, is Hebrew.  Millennia later, it was the language God used when He spoke with the Apostle Paul at his conversion on the Road to Damascus (Acts 26:14).

What is even more fascinating is that Hebrew was the very language God used to create the world.  Because of two recent discoveries we now know that Creation was information-based, not "physical-collision-based", as the evolutionists blindly assert.  Scientists’ unveiling of the DNA code and the complexity of all living cells shows us that information (i.e., language) had to exist before matter.  Information was needed to tell the matter how to behave.  If the cell were a mere blob as Darwin believed (or, rather, he hoped—because of his fierce desire to find an explanation of beginnings without having to acknowledge the existence of the Creator), evolution could be entertained, on some level, as one of a number of groundless theories.  The 700-page book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Stephen C. Meyer, HarperOne, 2009) shows us that quite the opposite is true.  With the perfection of high-powered microscopes, researchers discovered that there is an entire city of boundless structure and activity within each cell, more complex than any of us ever dreamed.  Before Genesis 1:1, God was creating codes, i.e. language.  That eternal alphabet was then what He used to speak the Creation into existence by fiat, i.e. by His Word.

When studying Hebrew, one soon discovers that God did an "over-the-top" job of creating it with depth.  Each Hebrew letter has three levels to its essence.

One:  Each letter is infused with a frequency, which matches a specific color of light on the color chart, which simultaneously matches a musical frequency on the scale of sound.

Two: Each letter possesses a numerical value: the letter aleph is one, yud is ten, etc.  The discovery of this gave rise to the Jewish study of Gematria, using numerical calculations as a means of exploring the interrelationship between words and concepts.

Three:  Each letter has meaning, represents a concept, and is a word in and of itself.  These meaningful letters then add to the meanings of words.  Contrast this to the alphabets of all other languages, which evolved by agreement.  A sound was assigned to an image, but the image has no meaning.  We could all agree to call a banana a "Ba", for example.  But then later an adolescent might say the nonsense sound "nananana" each and every time he grabbed one, to imply "I've got one and you don't!"  So then we could add that to the ba because all of his adolescent friends agreed that was a cool sound and decided to use it too (i.e. because of mere usage), so now the word becomes ba-nana.  But it could have just as easily been called a "murph" or a "clop".  Not so with Hebrew.

If the letter aleph means strength, that letter is included in the larger word for the name of God.  Every letter in His name is also one of His attributes.  Meaning is heaped upon meaning.  Most Hebrew root words contain three letters.  If you multiply the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet by the 3 combinations of 3 you get thousands and thousands of root word combinations, loaded with meaning.  When these root words are combined with suffixes and prefixes and other root words, the potential is for enough words to cover any contingency and the need for any future word needed by new technology, into the infinite future.  Hebrew becomes a language big enough for all time, which shall never lose its meanings.

Further, when you add the number and the frequency of the letter to the meaning you see that the letters are teeming with power and voltage.  When God created man by fiat He created not just the function (voltage and energy) of the man, but the very meaning of the man at the same time.  Adam is a word that shares letters with the name of God in Hebrew; thus we get "man made in the image of God."  And so it is with the entire created order.  Far from a random, chance universe, everything in the created order arrived with meaning.  We find that the magnificent tools of creation were the divine alphabet.

If you want to go for a very deep swim, study Hebrew.  Hang onto any raft to begin with and you'll comprehend more and more as you go.  Just jump into the water.  If you want an immediate easy nearby raft, start by singing along with the Aleph-Bet song on YouTube video.  It's contagiously happy, and has been viewed nearly a million times.  Then go to Akhlah.com and download their free page of  How to Write Block Letters in Hebrew, print them out and start tracing them just a few minutes each day, until you master them.  Kindergarten classes use them—you can do them too.  You could also consider our Hebrew Alef-Bet for Simpletons (letter cartoons) eBook.  Once you are further into it you might order our Hebrew Zoom-Type course, so you can learn Hebrew letters and basic words while becoming adept at typing in Hebrew quickly on your regular keyboard.  There now, you are launched.  You have the DNA of Creation right there under your pencil :).

For an inspiring account of a man who was singularly involved in the first-ever revival of a language that was virtually dead, read Tongue of the Prophets: The Life Story of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, by Robert St. John.  Ben Yehuda (1858-1922) devoted his life to making Hebrew the language of the nation of Israel that was being reestablished in Palestine.  It’s a free download in a number of electronic formats at http://archive.org/details/tongueoftheproph001031mbp

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