# Should I learn Biblical Hebrew first and then modern?



## bar mitzvah

I intend to learn both Biblical and modern Hebrew. Which one should I do first?
I remember reading that if one wanted to learn all four types of Greek, one should start with Homeric, because Attic was a simplified form of it, and Koine was a simplified form of Attic, and modern Greek was a simplified form of Koine, and it was always easier to go from complex to simplified. It was much harder to go from simplified to complex.


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## Egmont

You might enjoy reading this discussion of that exact topic on Quora.com.


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## bar mitzvah

Thanks!


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## Drink

I'm gonna contradict the quora answer. It doesn't matter which one you learn first, either one will help you learn the other more quickly. It's also important to remember that they really are the same language and not at all that different from each other, in contrast with the situation in Greek.

Personally I started with Modern Hebrew and then got Marc Zvi Brettler's _Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Israeli Hebrew_.


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## bar mitzvah

Are you saying that modern Hebrew is not a simplified form of Biblical Hebrew? I always thought that languages became simpler over time. Thus we have Latin -> French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.
Similalry, we have Sanskrit -> Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Bengali, etc.
We also have Proto-Germanic -> English, German, Dutch, etc.


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## entangledbank

But Hebrew didn't evolve over time: not over that much time, anyway. It was a frozen liturgical language for much of the last 2000 years, not a naturally developing Koine or Prakrit. Modern Israeli Hebrew started from Biblical Hebrew. The simplifications in the intervening period were comparatively minor, such as the Ashkenazic loss of the more distinctly Semitic consonants.


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## bar mitzvah

I see! I knew that many phonological changes had taken place, especially the merging of several distinct phonemes (although some of these mergers have not taken place in the speech of Arab Jews), but I was talking about changes in syntax and morphology, i.e. grammatical changes.


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## PakoBckuu

bar mitzvah said:


> I see! I knew that many phonological changes had taken place, especially the merging of several distinct phonemes (although some of these mergers have not taken place in the speech of Arab Jews), but I was talking about changes in syntax and morphology, i.e. grammatical changes.


As I understand it, the constructor of modern Hebrew had a general goal of returning to Biblical Hebrew, but he had different huge challenges in his reconstruction, a big one being the 2000 years' time difference. It's known that in order to make his reconstruction, he relied on other languages like Aramaic. 

It's an interesting topic, since Hebrew was also not a totally dead language either, nor is really Latin, since people continued to read it and speak it, but basically in extremely limited circles. Nowadays I heard there are some bishops who don't know Latin. 

Anyway, to answer your question, this website considers there to be different dialects of Hebrew and notes differences between ancient and modern Hebrew:
http://www.cartoonhebrew.com/modern-biblical-hebrew-differences

*Grammar* — A fairly big difference is that ancient Hebrew used verb tenses differently, with a richer range of options. One example is the _Vav Hahipuch_. 


*Vav Hahipuch* — The Vav Hahipuch is a neat feature of biblical Hebrew, where the presence of a Vav at the beginning of a verb conjugation actually changed the tense of the verb. Normally that Vav actually just means _and_.


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## Drink

bar mitzvah said:


> Are you saying that modern Hebrew is not a simplified form of Biblical Hebrew? I always thought that languages became simpler over time. Thus we have Latin -> French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.
> Similalry, we have Sanskrit -> Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Bengali, etc.
> We also have Proto-Germanic -> English, German, Dutch, etc.



Languages evolve, but that doesn't mean they necessarily become simpler. Some things become simplified, while other things become more complex. But regardless, when you learn anything, you normally don't start with the most complicated part of it.



entangledbank said:


> But Hebrew didn't evolve over time: not over that much time, anyway. It was a frozen liturgical language for much of the last 2000 years, not a naturally developing Koine or Prakrit. Modern Israeli Hebrew started from Biblical Hebrew. The simplifications in the intervening period were comparatively minor, such as the Ashkenazic loss of the more distinctly Semitic consonants.



Hebrew was never a frozen language. Literary Hebrew was in continuous use for writing about religious topics throughout the Middle Ages through today. It certainly evolved in some ways over that time.


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## Memak

Personally I would learn Modern Hebrew first. You will then be able to understand much of the Bible in Hebrew that will enrich your learning because there are differences. However, if you learn Biblical first, you won't be able to understand the headlines on a newspaper. There are also many different and inexpensive ways to help your learning modern Hebrew on the internet that you won't find for Biblical.
When push comes to shove though, it depends on what you want to do first - do you want to visit Israel and be able to try out your Hebrew in the cafes and shops or do you want to understand the Bible better and not travel for a while?  My own story is that I wanted to learn Biblical but there was no avenue for me to do that unless i moved and went to Bible school or uni somewhere - something I wasn't able to do at the time. I have never regretted learning modern Hebrew first though because it made Biblical Hebrew easy.


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