From there I made my way through the major prophets Ezekiel (2017) and Jeremiah (2018). Reading Daniel (2018) required taking another swing at Aramaic, so I turned next to Ezra, with its Aramaic sections, and Nehemiah (2019). That left the Pentateuch (in Greek), the Former Prophets, the remainder of the Writings (including Proverbs), and the Minor Prophets.
Progress was slow over the next several years. I found I could make some headway during summers, but not during the school year when my day-job as a NT professor became all-consuming. To make a long story short, I finally completed a reading of the entire Hebrew Bible / Protestant Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek in June, almost 25 years after I began.
If there is a lesson here, it is the value of making a schedule and keeping to it. One of the great joys of last semester’s sabbatical was the chapter-a-day reading rhythm that, like a Duolingo streak, became a habit I didn’t want to break, and in due course brought me over the finish line.
I suspect reading the entire Bible in Hebrew or Greek is less common than it ought to be, even for those of us who teach the languages. But that doesn’t make it more than a baby step. I am well-aware that reading through texts just once is not the best way to build fluency or to retain new vocabulary. And I am nowhere near as literate or versed in Scripture (in any language) as I should be.
Consider John, a fourth-century Christian martyr, who, Eusebius says,
“ ... had written whole books of the Divine Scriptures, ‘not in tables of stone’ as the divine apostle says, neither on skins of animals, nor on paper which moths and time destroy, but truly ‘in fleshy tables of the heart,’ in a transparent soul and most pure eye of the mind, so that whenever he wished he could repeat, as if from a treasury of words, any portion of the Scripture, whether in the law, or the prophets, or the historical books, or the gospels, or the writings of the apostles. I confess that I was astonished when I first saw the man as he was standing in the midst of a large congregation and repeating portions of the Divine Scripture. While I only heard his voice, I thought that, according to the custom in the meetings, he was reading. But when I came near and perceived what he was doing, and observed all the others standing around him with sound eyes while he was using only the eyes of his mind, and yet was speaking naturally like some prophet, and far excelling those who were sound in body, it was impossible for me not to glorify God and wonder. - Eusebius, “Martyrs of Palestine” ch. 13.6-8
In Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, Richard Hays asked:
“What would it mean to undertake the task of reading Scripture along with the Evangelists? First of all, it would mean cultivating a deep knowledge of the Old Testament texts, getting these texts into our blood and bones. It would mean learning the texts by heart in the fullest sense. The pervasive, complex, and multivalent uses of Scripture that we find in the Gospels could arise only in and for a community immersed in scriptural language and imagery. ... But alas, many Christian communities have lost touch with the sort of deep primary knowledge of Scripture—especially Israel’s Scripture—that would enable them even to perceive the messages conveyed by the Evangelists’ biblical allusions and echoes, let alone to employ Scripture with comparable facility in their own preaching and renarration of the gospel story.” - Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 357
So I celebrate baby steps, knowing that “the days of the years of my life ... have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.” (Gen 47:9 KJV)
No comments:
Post a Comment