Like the authors of this book, I love to teach the biblical languages. It is one of the great joys of my life. Each year I am reinvigorated as I watch students emerge from the flood waters of paradigms and vocabulary memorization to experience God’s word in a completely new way. But let’s be honest, teaching and learning these languages is really the easy part of the process. We set aside time together in class, we have introductory resources shaped to our various levels and needs, and we are invested with the excitement of being able to read our first verse without recourse to a grammar or lexicon.
No doubt, learning the basics requires hard work, but the real challenge lies beyond the basics, in the land of life and ministry after we have completed our education. The classroom is behind us, our classmates have dispersed, and the demands of life and ministry begin to reshape our priorities and commitments. This is the moment of decision, the edge of the cliff. Sadly, it is at this point that the hard-fought treasures of the biblical languages are regularly jettisoned over the cliffs of pragmatism and lost forever.
In the twenty-first century, however, it appears that winds of providence are blowing in our favor. There is what seems to be a healthy and exciting resurgence of the appreciation, study, and use of the biblical languages both in the United States and in other parts of the world. This is exactly why we need a book like Hebrew for Life. Why? Because Hebrew is life! Over 75 percent of the Christian Bible was originally written in Hebrew, and this portion of God’s word is both living (Heb. 4:12) and life-giving (Ps. 119:50, 93). The word of God in the Old Testament restores the soul, makes wise the simple, gladdens the heart, brings light to the eyes, endures forever (Ps. 19:8–10), and, most importantly, bears witness to the person and work of Jesus Christ (Luke 24:44; John 5:39–40, 46).
I wonder how many of us who serve as ministers of the word of God reflect the true value of God’s word in our time and study as we give ourselves to maintaining and improving skill in the biblical languages? We are fortunate to live in a day of unprecedented print and electronic resources to aid us in our study of the languages. We are without excuse, and so we ought to follow this scriptural admonition: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15 ESV).
Miles V. Van Pelt Professor of Old Testament and Biblical Languages and Director of the Summer Institute for Biblical Languages, Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi; coauthor of Basics of Biblical Hebrew and author of Basics of Biblical Aramaic