Lesson 10 | After Jonah
[2] Next Step: A Detailed Dive
If you have time to dig more deeply into the Hebrew Bible, you can make even better progress this way:
Do a Detailed Dive into Ruth
This option will work for you if you are able to devote an hour or two per week—or more!—to focus on studying Hebrew. This will take more time than only watching a Daily Dose of Hebrew, but actually answering questions about a passage and memorizing new vocabulary will increase your joy in reading God’s Word in Hebrew. (And it is amazing how much progress you can make by taking just one step at a time! Doing even just one hour of study per week can turbocharge your abilities in biblical Hebrew if you keep it up for several months.)
The book of Ruth is not too difficult to read, although there are difficult spots (as you should expect by now). To be able to read it with enjoyment in Hebrew, two resources will be invaluable:
- A Book-by-Book Guide to Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary, William R. Osborne and Russell L. Meek (208 pages). Rather than focusing on organizing vocabulary lists based on their usage in the Hebrew Bible, this book lists vocabulary based on its occurrence in each book.
- A Workbook for Intermediate Hebrew: Grammar, Exegesis, and Commentary on Jonah and Ruth, Robert B. Chisholm Jr. (306 pages). This workbook gives grammatical, syntactical, and/or theological notes on each verse of Jonah and Ruth. It also gives you space to answer questions about the morphology of verbs, types of clauses, and more, with an answer key at the back.
Purchase the Workbook and then follow a consistent schedule, working on a manageable amount of Ruth as many days of the week as you can. For example, if you answer the questions on Ruth, doing just one verse per day, five days per week, it will take you only about 4 months to finish the book!
Consider the following sample question:
שְׁפֹט — Parse this verb. Note that the infinitive construct (which is a verbal noun) is filling a genitival slot after the construct form. See EE, 78; W-OC, 601.
“EE” refers to From Exegesis to Exposition, also by Chisholm, and W-OC refers to the grammar by Waltke and O’Connor that we briefly describe in the next step. These books contain fuller discussions of the syntactical issue in the question at the page numbers given.
And as you answer the questions in the Workbook, work on memorizing the words in the first two lists under Ruth in the Book-by-Book Guide—40 words in total (some of which you already know). Then you’ll know all the words used at least two times in Ruth, and some of the words used once, which will make your reading smoother and more enjoyable.