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Learn Hebrew

In one sentence: you can learn to read the Hebrew Bible one step at a time, starting with 22 letters and the names God gave Himself.

God spoke the Old Testament in Hebrew. A translation gives you what He said, and the Hebrew lets you hear how He said it: the wordplay, the repeated roots, the names that carry a promise. Each step below builds on the one before, so take them in order.

The path

  1. The Hebrew Alphabet. The 22 letters, their five final forms and the vowel points, with the sound of each. By the end you can sound out Genesis 1:1.
  2. How Hebrew Is Pronounced. Why you will hear Shabbat and Shabbos, the pronunciation this site uses, and how the name of God is read.
  3. The Names of God: Word Cards. Twenty-one printable flashcards, in an order that adds a few letters at a time. Work through the deck and you will have met all 22 letters, in the names God revealed Himself by. The Names of God is the study behind them. The Names of Jesus word cards are a second deck of 18, the Old Testament's names for the coming Christ, each beside the verse that gives the name to Jesus, and the Names of the Holy Spirit word cards a third deck of 15. The same names in the Greek of the New Testament are in Learn Greek.
  4. Three Scripts and Writing Sheets. The same letters in Paleo-Hebrew, square script and modern cursive, where each comes from, and A4 sheets to practise writing them, including the names of God in all three.
  5. Read Your First Verse: the Shema. Deuteronomy 6:4, six words, letter by letter: the verse Jesus called the most important.
  6. Aleph with Beth. The free video course this site recommends for going on to read whole passages.

Alongside these, the Memory Verse Cards print verses such as Genesis 1:1 and Deuteronomy 6:4 in Hebrew, word by word, with the ESV.

Biblical and modern Hebrew

The letters are the same in both, and so is most of the core vocabulary: shalom, melekh (king), tov (good) mean what they meant to David. The differences are these:

  • History. Hebrew was Israel's everyday language through the First Temple period. After the exile, Aramaic and then Greek took over daily life, and for about 1,700 years Hebrew was read, prayed and written but spoken by no one as a first language. In the late 1800s Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and others revived it as a spoken language, and it became the language of the state of Israel.
  • Vocabulary. Modern Hebrew has thousands of words the Bible never needed, often built from biblical roots: a rofe (doctor) comes from the root of YHWH rofekha, "the LORD your healer".
  • Grammar. Modern Hebrew verbs mark past, present and future. Biblical Hebrew verbs mark whether an action is complete or ongoing, and biblical narrative strings events together with a form (the vav-consecutive) that modern Hebrew does not use.
  • Writing. Bibles print the vowel points; modern books and newspapers mostly leave them out, and handwriting uses a cursive script.

So a modern dictionary or an Israeli friend is a good guide to a word's sound and its everyday sense today. For what a word meant in Scripture, this site's word studies go to lexicons built on the biblical text itself, and the cards here mark which is which: the meaning on each card is the biblical one, and the line marked Today is the modern.