Gah! Hebrew is Difficult!

Just figured I would vent. I did quite well on my first Hebrew Exam. I thought I was doing pretty well since the exam went O.K. I got a little concerned when we started covering interrogatives and personal pronouns, but I got that after a few attempts. But then we got to pronominal suffixes... gah!

There's my progress so far. The class meets Monday and Wednesday evening, and we've been covering a chapter each class for five weeks now. That does not leave much time between Monday and Wednesday to learn new material! I have to budget my time and get ahead on Mondays. *sigh*

I have asked myself several times, "why learn Hebrew?" After all, it is not as though the text is seriously in dispute, and I know of no actual translation issues; it's been long enough that the issues are settled by now, right? But each time I ask myself that, an unsolicited answer comes up, usually in class, where the teacher illustrates something that you just don't see in a translation.

One good example is the play on words between 1 Samuel 2:27 through the end of chapter, where the word for "weighty" is variously translated honor, glory, or heavy as appropriate. The fact that Eli considered his sons more "weighty" than God, and Eli was a "heavy" man and broke his neck, and the "glory" of Israel departed with Ark... It is interesting to see the narrative tied together by a single, unifying word.

That is why I'll continue studying; I want to see and understand these things in order to better proclaim, "Look at what God is saying to us!"