The Best Way to Learn the Biblical Languages

May 26, 2020 // Kevin Grasso

“Why should I learn to speak or write Greek or Hebrew when all I want to do is read it?”

This is a question I have heard in a lot of various forms. Although I think there are many reasons why you should learn to use the biblical languages actively (which I will discuss below), I understand where the question is coming from. At first blush, it would make sense to practice reading if you want to get better at, well, reading. However, I want to suggest in this post that the best way to get better at reading is actually not to read but to practice other, more difficult, language skills. Of course, you need to read too, but it is the other language skills that will change the way you interact with the written text. Let’s begin with a discussion on why anyone would want to learn the biblical languages in the first place.

Why learn the biblical languages?

No one’s goal should be to read the biblical languages—it is understanding that we are going after.

Like the Ethiopian eunuch who read the text but did not understand it, many people learn to “read” the text in the original language, but their understanding is not any deeper than if they were reading a translation.

In fact, because many people know the English version so well (or some other translation), they are often merely “reading” the English through the Greek or Hebrew.

So how do we move from reading in the original to understanding in the original?

This is where, I think, we have to radically change our approach to learning the biblical languages. Learning a language is like learning to play an instrument. It takes lots and lots of practice, and it is a skill to develop, not a fact to be memorized. What is the skill you are developing when learning a language? To know a language means to be able to communicate in that language, whether by successfully understanding the author or speaker’s intended meaning or using words to successfully convey one’s thoughts through speaking or writing. In other words, knowing a language means to be able to use it to convey or interpret thoughts. That should be our goal. As much as possible, we want to get into the minds of the biblical authors, so ultimately, we can understand God’s Word to the greatest degree possible.

But what does it really mean to improve our language skills and understand God’s Word better? Getting better at a language means improving your communication skills in that language. In other words, it involves understanding input, like a written text or a speech, more accurately and efficiently. With practice, the nuances of the language begin to become intuitive, so you don’t have to dissect what you are reading. You begin to think in Greek or Hebrew. And when this begins to happen, you can start to consume much larger swaths of texts in the original, which further develops your intuitions and skills in the language. To put it another way, the better you get, the easier it will be to practice. Now, we have to answer the question of how we build this kind of communicative intuition in the most efficient way possible.

How do we learn the biblical languages?

Learning the biblical languages should be no different than learning non-biblical languages—we develop the skill by using the language in communication. However, “communication” can happen in one of four mediums, and they are not all created equal.

There are two active skills, speaking and writing, and two passive skills, listening and reading. Both sets of skills can be distinguished on the basis of speed: speaking requires a faster processing speed than writing, and listening demands a faster speed than reading. Active skills are more difficult than passive skills, so we are left with the following order of skills based on descending difficulty: speaking, writing, listening, reading. In other words, reading is the easiest language skill there is.

The natural next question is “So what?”

Researchers have found that practicing harder language skills like speaking makes you better at both speaking and listening than if you just practiced listening. You can click here to read about a study done on this by University of Wisconsin professors here. In other words, being able to produce the language actively will help you in both active and passive skills (Laufer & Nation 2013).

Personally, I can attest to this as well in my own studies. Once I started to activate my passive reading knowledge, my ability to read the text more fluently increased dramatically. It transformed the way I read and understood the text.

So if you want to get better at listening, stop focusing on listening and turn your primary energies toward speaking. And if you want to get better at reading, stop focusing on reading and start writing.

As you focus more on active knowledge, you’ll notice a dramatic increase in how quickly you improve, and you’ll start to read the Bible more fluently in the original than ever before. The written text will become alive in a new way, and you will begin to develop intuitions about the language that will bring you to a deeper understanding of the Word of God.

Kevin Grasso received his M.A. in Linguistics with a concentration in Bible Translation from Dallas International University. He is currently writing his dissertation on the semantics of Biblical Hebrew to receive his PhD in Hebrew Language from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has taught Biblical Greek for the University of the Holy Land and is on the Executive Committee for the Biblical Hebrew Linguistics and Philology Network.

Kevin is also the Founder & CEO of Biblingo, an app that makes the biblical langauges more accessible and easier to learn.