Biblical Hebrew – Intermediate

Description

Intermediate Biblical Hebrew

Objectives:  To prepare for the examination, the candidate is expected to be able to identify more complex parts of speech, grammatical forms and syntax such as irregular binyanim, conjugation of prepositions, tautological infinitives, infinitive construct, nominal clauses, relative clauses, conjunctions, word order, more complex modal forms of the jussive, cohortative and imperative; analyze a verb for its root stem; assess grammatical questions and give correct answer; incorporate all the grammatical syntax and morphology learned and correctly translate 11 lines of biblical prose and 6 lines of biblical poetry; parse verbal forms according to root, person, number, and gender; switch perfect to imperfect and vice-versa; switch katol to yiktol forms and vice-versa; inflect nouns; switch composite verbs to regular separate form; and infer from context of biblical verse the proper tense and meaning of a word.

Instruction:  The proficiency examination is administered under secure and proctored conditions. The main focus at this level of Biblical Hebrew is on syntax and lexicon (vocabulary), with a review of verbal and nominal morphology. Content covered includes: recognition of the shoresh: verbal morphology (reversal): paradigms of the binyanim (the strong verb paradigm, verbs with pey gronit, with ayin gronit, and lamed gronit, verbs with double ayin, weak verbs, verbs of pey yud, pey nun, ayin yud/ayin vav, lamed yud/lamed heh, pey alef, lamed alef), verbs with pronominal suffixes (accusative pronoun); nouns with possessive (genitive) pronominal suffixes (conjugations of singular and plural forms); conjugations of prepositions (e.g. ba’avuri, ba’avurech; the tense system: the use of the perfect (qatal) and the imperfect (yiqtol), the imperfect with vaw ha’hipuch, the perfect with vawha’hipuch; the tautological infinitive (e.g. haloch halchu, tarof toraf); construction of the infinitive construct with subject and object (la’asoto, b’vo’o); the nominal clause (sheker ha’chen, hevel ha’yofi); types of subordination and coordination;  the relative clause; conjunctions (ki, ya’an, ekev, al ki, al ken, ka’asher, pen, af); word order. Textual material will be taken from: (prose) I Samuel 19-21, Exodus 19-20;  (poetry) Amos 1-2, Isaiah 6, and Psalms 1 and 126.

This course has a value of 3 lower-level undergraduate credits.