Revisiting the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew

If Google Analytics is to be trusted, the most popular post on this blog is a 2010 comparison of three different Hebrew translations of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9-13. Although New Testament scholars have been much more interested in reconstructing Jesus’ supposed Aramaic ipsissima verba,[1] 17,300+ views suggests that popular interest in a Hebrew Lord’s Prayer is lively enough.[2]

My concern here is not with what Jesus actually said or what language he said it in. I teach Ancient Hebrew as a living language, and I am on the lookout for comprehensible Hebrew texts in biblical or Second Temple idiom that I can use to help develop my own and my students’ fluency. To be sure, there are many excellent ancient Jewish prayers in Hebrew, but because it is known and used, the Lord’s Prayer is a good choice for my Christian students. In the absence of a Hebrew textus receptus the problem is deciding which translation to use.

My original post compared Delitzsch (1877), Salkinson-Ginsberg (1886) and the 1977 Bible Society of Israel. I recently stumbled upon two additional versions published by Christian Czerskier (1830 / rev. 1836) and Christian Hermann Friedrich Bialloblotzky (1833) while searching for Hebrew translations of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. As both versions have the advantage of being farther removed from the changes that took place when Hebrew was adopted as the primary spoken language of Jews in the land of Israel, I thought I would update my translation comparison by adding in these two older and less well known versions.

I also intended to comment on the lack of attention to Hebrew versions of the Lord’s prayer. … But then I checked ATLA and discovered Jean Carmignac’s 1978 analysis of an astonishing 68 different Hebrew translations of the Lord’s prayer ranging from the 9th century to 1976.[3]

Carmignac explains that both the Czerskier and Bialloblotzky translations are derived from the 1814 translation by the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews. Czerskier adopted the London Society’s 1833 revision (77 n. 116), while Bialloblotzky made one change to William Greenfield’s 1831 revision of the London Society’s 1814 translation. As I had settled on Bialloblotzky as the more-biblical sounding translation (to my ear), I was pleased to see the London Society’s translation included alongside Delitzsch in Carmignac’s shortlist of eight “that stand out above all the rest.”

Carmignac’s essay also defends his own translation on the basis of parallels in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the rest of this post, I compare Delitzsch (1877) [D] with Greenfield-Bialloblotzky (1831 / 1833) [B] and Carmignac (1969 / 1978) [C], adding notes mostly drawn from Carmignac (1978):

(D) Delitzsch (1877)	(B) Bialloblotzky (1833)	(C) Carmignac (1969)
אָבִינוּ שֶׁבַּשָׁמַיִם יִתְקַדַּשׁ שְׁמֶךָ תָּבֹּא מַלְכוּתֶךָ יֵעָשֶׂה רְצוֹנְךָ	אָבִינוּ אֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׁמַיִם יִתְקַדֵּשׁ שְׁמֶךָ תָּבֹא מַלְכוּתֶךָ יְהִי רְצוֹנְךָ	אָבִינוּ אֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׁמַיִם יִקָּדֵשׁ שִׁמְכָה תָּבוֹא מַלְכוּתְכָה יֵעָשֶׂה רְצוֹנְכָה
כַּאֲשֶׁר בַּשָׁמַיִם גַּם בָּאָרֶץ	כַּאֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׁמַיִם כֵּן גַּם בָּאָרֶץ	כַּאֲשֶׁר בְּשָׁמַיִם וְעַל אָרֶץ
אֶת־לֶחֶם חוּקֵּנוּ תֵּן־לָנוּ הַיּוֹם	לֶחֶם חֻקֵּנוּ תֵּן לָנוּ הַיּוֹם	לַחְמֵנוּ לְמָחָר תֵּן לָנוּ יוֹם יוֹם
וּמְחַל־לָנוּ עַל־חֹבוֹתֵינוּ	וּסְלַח לָנוּ אֶת־חֹבֹתֵינוּ	וְשָׂא לָנוּ נְשֵׂינוּ
כַּאֲשֶׁר מָחַלְנוּ גַּם־אֲנַחְנוּ לְחַיָּבֵינוּ	כַּאֲשֶׁר אֲנַחְנוּ סֹלְחִים לְבַעֲלֵי חוֹבֵינוּ	כַּאֲשֶׁר גַּם אֲנוּ נָשָׂאנוּ לְמַשֵּׂינוּ
וְאַל־תְּבִיאֵנוּ לִידֵי נִסָּיוֹן	וְאַל תְּבִיאֵנוּ לְמַסָּה	וְאַל תְּבִיאֵנוּ בְמַסָּה
כִּי אִם־תְּחַלְּצֵנוּ מִן־הָרָע	כִּי אִם הַצִּילֵנוּ מִן הָרָע	כִּי (אִם) הַצִּילֵנוּ מִן הָרָשָׁע
כִּי לְךָ הַמַּמְלָכָה וְהַגְּבוּרָה וְהַתִּפְאֶרֶת לְעוֹלְמֵי עוֹלָמִים אָמֵן	כִּי לְךָ הַמַּמְלָכָה וְהַגְּבוּרָה וְהַתִּפְאֶרֶת לְעוֹלָמִים אָמֵן

Our Father which art in heaven 
Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς
D: אָבִינוּ שֶׁבַּשָׁמַיִם 
B / C: אָבִינוּ אֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׁמַיִם

Although the shortened relative pronoun, שׁ, becomes common in Late Biblical Hebrew, Carmignac (p. 60) notes that the DSS prefer the more common Biblical Hebrew form אשׁר, and that אשׁר בשׁמים appears in the Ten Commandments (Exod 20:4; Deut 5:8) and at Qumran while שׁבשׁמים is first attested in Rabbinic literature.

Hallowed be thy name 
ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου 
D: יִתְקַדַּשׁ שְׁמֶךָ
B: יִתְקַדֵּשׁ שְׁמֶךָ
C: יִקָּדֵשׁ שִׁמְכָה

After reviewing other translations, Carmignac felt “a strong inclination” to change his 1969 translation of ἁγιασθήτω from the Niphal (יִקָּדֵשׁ) (also in Greenfield’s revision) to the Hithpael (יִתְקַדֵּשׁ) form adopted by the majority of Hebrew translations, noting the use of the Hithpael form in the Jewish Qaddish prayer and in Qumran. Since the meaning of Niphal and Hithpael forms can overlap, the Hithpael (as in D and B) is to be preferred. (Carmignac’s שִׁמְכָה instead of שְׁמֶךָ simply follows Qumran orthography.)

Thy kingdom come
ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου
D: תָּבֹּא מַלְכוּתֶךָ
B: תָּבֹא מַלְכוּתֶךָ
C: תָּבוֹא מַלְכוּתְכָה

Carmignac simply prefers the fuller Qumran orthography here and throughout the prayer. I assume the dagesh in Delitzsch’s תָּבֹּא is a mistake. Carmignac explains that the Late Biblical Hebrew מַלְכוּת refers to “the act of reigning,” while מַמְלָכָה means “realm.”

Thy will be done
γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου
D: יֵעָשֶׂה רְצוֹנְךָ
B: יְהִי רְצוֹנְךָ
C: יֵעָשֶׂה רְצוֹנְכָה

The difference between the Niphal jussive יֵעָשֶׂה preferred by Delitzsch and Carmignac and the Qal jussive יְהִי adopted by Bialloblotzky is, according to Carmignac, between “to be accomplished” and “to become.”

In the Bible רָצוֹן is only combined with the verb היה when it is preceded by the preposition לְ (לְרָצוֹן) (Lev 22:20-21; Ps 19:15), while עשׂה is quite often collocated with רָצוֹן on its own in the sense of doing someone’s will (e.g., Ezra 10:11; Ps 40:9; 103:21; 143:10; multiple passages in the DSS; Avot. 2.4).

However, the DSS do combine היה and רָצוֹן in reference to God’s will (e.g., 1QS xi 18; 1QH ix 22, xviii 4; 4Q393, 4Q418). And in the Mishnah, יְהִי רָצוֹן does occur in connection with prayers for God’s will to be done (Ber. 9.3 [rendered by OAM as “May it be God’s will”]; Taan. 4.8; Avot. 4.8).

This leads to a bigger and more exegetically significant question: Does the prayer (primarily) invite human participation, in effect offering oneself up to the divine will and asking to be conformed in action to God’s will so that God’s will is done in the pray-er’s doing? Or does the prayer (primarily) invite God to do God’s eschatological will (as in Taan. 4.8; Avot. 4.8)? Here, I’m guessing יֵעָשֶׂה רְצוֹנְךָ is a better translation—in other words, the prayer’s emphasis is on human involvement in doing God’s will—but I still sort of prefer the 1814 London Society’s יְהִי רְצוֹנְךָ.

In earth, as it is in heaven
ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς
D: כַּאֲשֶׁר בַּשָׁמַיִם גַּם בָּאָרֶץ
B: כַּאֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׁמַיִם כֵּן גַּם בָּאָרֶץ
C: כַּאֲשֶׁר בְּשָׁמַיִם וְעַל אָרֶץ

Carmignac’s version attempts to preserve the difference between Greek prepositions. I prefer Greenfield-Bialloblotzky’s emphatic rendering of καί (see Deut 12:30 for the expression). Carmignac counts 25 different ways the phrase has been translated into Hebrew. Take your pick.

Give us this day our daily bread
τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον
D: אֶת־לֶחֶם חוּקֵּנוּ תֵּן־לָנוּ הַיּוֹם
B: לֶחֶם חֻקֵּנוּ תֵּן לָנוּ הַיּוֹם
C: לַחְמֵנוּ לְמָחָר תֵּן לָנוּ יוֹם יוֹם

The Delitzsch and Greenfield-Bialloblotzky renderings, which differ only in the spelling of חֹק and the presence or absence of the direct object marker, draw on Prov 30:8 where לֶחֶם חֻקִּי refers to the speaker’s daily food allotment (NJPS / NIV: “my daily bread”). Carmignac’s לְמָחָר (“for tomorrow”) proposal seems closer to the meaning of ἐπιούσιον, but יוֹם יוֹם renders Luke’s καθ‘ ἡμέραν. For Matthew’s σήμερον, הַיּוֹם is to be preferred.

And forgive us our debts
καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν
D: וּמְחַל־לָנוּ עַל־חֹבוֹתֵינוּ
B: וּסְלַח לָנוּ אֶת־חֹבֹתֵינוּ
C: וְשָׂא לָנוּ נְשֵׂינוּ

Delitzsch’s מחל means “forgive” in Rabbinic Hebrew, but not in the Hebrew Bible or in the DSS. (According to the DSS database in Accordance, 4Q267 is the only possible, but very fragmentary, exception.) Carmignac prefers the combination of נשׂא, which can mean forgive, and the cognate, נְשִׂי, which appears once in 2 Kings 4:7 in the sense of “debt.” I prefer Bialloblotzky’s use of סלח, a common verb with the primary meaning “to forgive.” A singular form of the noun חוֹב does occur once in Ezek 18:7 with the sense of guilt or debt; the feminine form חוֹבָה shows up in the Mishnah. I’m siding in favour of clear meaning over word-play. Again, take your pick.

As we forgive our debtors
ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφήκαμεν [maj. text ἀφίεμεν] τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν
D: כַּאֲשֶׁר מָחַלְנוּ גַּם־אֲנַחְנוּ לְחַיָּבֵינוּ
B: כַּאֲשֶׁר אֲנַחְנוּ סֹלְחִים לְבַעֲלֵי חוֹבֵינוּ
C: כַּאֲשֶׁר גַּם אֲנוּ נָשָׂאנוּ לְמַשֵּׂינוּ

“Here we reach the maximum disagreement with fifty-eight divergent opinions” (p. 66). Delitzsch’s לְחַיָּבֵינוּ adopts the adjective חַיָּב, which appears once in Sirach 8:5 (according to DCH) as well as in the Mishnah.

Carmignac continues the word play on the root נשׂא by constructing a Hiphil participle with an otherwise unattested meaning of “debtor.” The London Society’s 1814 translation renders τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν as לחובינו, apparently reading a Qal participle from the verb חוב, which does not occur in the Hebrew Bible but does at Qumran and the Mishnah.

The Greenfield-Bialloblotzky revision seems mistakenly to conflate the London Society’s חוֹבֵינוּ (“our debtors”) with לבעלי חובותינו (“the masters of our debts”), a phrase borrowed from a Hebrew translation of Matthew completed ca. 1520-1530, which, in turn, draws on בַּעַל מַשֵּׁה in Deut 15:2, substituting the more common חובה for Deuteronomy’s משׁא (a hapax). According to Carmignac, “the mere length of this phrase makes [the] suggestion hardly possible” (see pp. 66, 30-31 for discussion).

In this case, I prefer the London Society’s reading: כַּאֲשֶׁר אֲנַחְנוּ סֹלְחִים לְחוֹבֵינוּ.

And lead us not into temptation
καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν
D: וְאַל־תְּבִיאֵנוּ לִידֵי נִסָּיוֹן
B: וְאַל תְּבִיאֵנוּ לְמַסָּה
C: וְאַל תְּבִיאֵנוּ בְמַסָּה

As Carmignac notes, מַסָּה is better attested than נִסָּיוֹן. The difference between the prepositions בְּ and לְ in this context seem minimal, though the Hebrew Bible usually has בְּ in connection with the place.

But deliver us from evil
ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ
D: כִּי אִם־תְּחַלְּצֵנוּ מִן־הָרָע
B: כִּי אִם הַצִּילֵנוּ מִן הָרָע
C: כִּי (אִם) הַצִּילֵנוּ מִן הָרָשָׁע

Carmignac prefers רָשָׁע over רָע because at Qumran רָשָׁע has the sense of a wicked entity, but in the LXX πονηρός almost always translates רע not רשׁע.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
Maj. text: Ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. Ἀμήν.
D: כִּי לְךָ הַמַּמְלָכָה וְהַגְּבוּרָה וְהַתִּפְאֶרֶת לְעוֹלְמֵי עוֹלָמִים אָמֵן
B: כִּי לְךָ הַמַּמְלָכָה וְהַגְּבוּרָה וְהַתִּפְאֶרֶת לְעוֹלָמִים אָמֵן
C: No translation provided

This results in an eclectic text:

אָבִינוּ אֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׁמַיִם
יִתְקַדֵּשׁ שְׁמֶךָ
תָּבֹא מַלְכוּתֶךָ
יֵעָשֶׂה רְצוֹנְךָ or יְהִי רְצוֹנְךָ 
כַּאֲשֶׁר בַּשָּׁמַיִם כֵּן גַּם בָּאָרֶץ
לַחְמֵנוּ לְמָחָר תֵּן לָנוּ הַיּוֹם
וּסְלַח לָנוּ אֶת־חֹבֹתֵינוּ
כַּאֲשֶׁר אֲנַחְנוּ סֹלְחִים לְחוֹבֵינוּ
וְאַל תְּבִיאֵנוּ בְמַסָּה
כִּי אִם הַצִּילֵנוּ מִן הָרָע

One final note: The Hebrew version of the Lord's Prayer in the Pater Noster Chapel in Jerusalem pictured in the Wikimedia Commons photograph at the beginning of this post, reproduces a 1593 translation by Elias Hutter with a few minor changes (Carmignac 38).

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1. I say “supposed” because, as I have explained elsewhere, I do not assume Jesus taught—or prayed!—only in Aramaic. I note in passing that the Aramaic word for “father” is not the smoking gun it may appear to be. To be sure, the Aramaic word, “Abba,” used by Jesus (and other Jews) in addressing God as father, was adopted by the Greek-speaking early church (see Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6). But the use of “Abba” for father need not mean Jesus taught and prayed the “Lord’s Prayer” in Aramaic. After all, Hebrew-speaking Israelis today use “Abba” as a familial address. The word may originate as an Aramaic loanword, but it has been adopted into modern Hebrew. Let’s imagine for a moment that Second Temple Period Hebrew did the same.↩︎
2. The next most popular post, on Martin Luther’s Preface to the Revelation of St. John (1522), rings in at 14,500 views. “Reconstructed Koine Greek Pronunciation” (8,510 views) and “Ancient Greek Picture Flashcards in Anki” (5,710 views) come in 3rd and 4th.↩︎
3. Jean Carmignac, “Hebrew Translations of the Lord’s Prayer: An Historical Survey,” in Biblical and Near Eastern Studies: Essays in Honor of William Sanford LaSor, ed. Gary A. Tuttle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 18–79. More recent attempts to reconstruct a Hebrew Lord’s prayer include Charles R. Day, “The Lord’s Prayer: A Hebrew Reconstruction Based on Hebrew Prayers Found in the Synagogue,” Conspectus 7 (2009): 22–31 and Alexander Ponomariov, “The Lord’s Prayer in a Wider Setting: A New Hebrew Reconstruction,” Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 41.1 (2015): 71–100. Neither Day nor Ponomariov appear to have consulted Carmignac’s review of earlier translations. This is unfortunate, for, as Carmignac noted, “The value to any research project of having access to collections of previous efforts is precisely the help they afford in avoiding what is specious and ephemeral.” More helpful is David N. Bivin and Joshua N. Tilton’s massive 2011 essay, which can be found here: https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/769/. Eitan Berkowitz, “The Hebrew Translation of the Carolingian Lord’s Prayer: A Case Study in Using Linguistics to Understand History,” AJS Rev. 44.1 (2020): 23–47, offers a fresh analysis of the 9th century Hebrew version that survives in Latin transliteration. ↩︎

An AI Commonplace Part II: Possible Responses

“If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history. ... Most of all, ... you would love the way that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini have thrown a grenade into thousands of years of teaching and learning: the way they threaten to upend our ability to think with the robust clarity that is needed in emergencies of justice. - Katherine Rundell

In a previous post, I outlined the threat AI poses to education and learning in the Humanities. Here, I describe possible responses:

A non-starter for me is requiring students to use and evaluate AI in class. The best way to build AI-literacy is to learn to think without it. (See this 10 July 2026 column by Scott Carlson in CHE.)

(1)  Persuasion: First, then, we can and should try to persuade students to learn for their own sake. Good examples include:

• Katherine Rundell (again): “I tell the students I meet: imagine you’re an Olympic athlete. You set out to sprint the 3km across London, from Clapham to Balham. You know if you take the bus, it will be faster. But you also know that the point was never being in Clapham or Balham; they’re very similar: they both have a nice Pizza Express. It was the strength you built, the speed and knowledge of your body that you gained. A student’s essay on Macbeth has no value as a product. It’s what you learned in the reading and writing that created it – the swiftness and resilience and suppleness of thinking you built, along with the knowledge gained of a literary marvel, of something quicksilver and unsummarisable – that was the point. So you can’t collaborate with AI in the same way you can’t collaborate with a bus. And you cannot learn to think without a climbing frame of facts and ideas and texts to move around in.”  
• Jennifer Frey: “What I remind them of, in very clear terms, is that if they outsource their thinking, they’re simply outsourcing their own humanity.”
• From a more theological perspective, Russell Moore writes: “[T]echnology will make it easier and easier for you to stop thinking, to stop paying attention, to stop the renewal of your mind. Part of what it means to love is to conserve your ability to think, feel, and create. That requires paying attention to where the present age is attempting to pull you, and to map out another, harder way. Your brain does not belong to you. It was bought with a price. Guard that trust.” (See also Jordan Daniel Wood’s theological ‘mini-manifesto.’)

Last year I hoped to be able to get by with persuasion:

“Instead of totally changing the way I teach—and in the process abandoning effective ways of helping students learn—I will try once more to persuade my students that turning to AI to complete assignments in my courses will only hurt themselves.

That attempt failed, at least in my first and second year classes. Although my role was not primarily “to police the boundaries,” my zero-tolerance policy, among other things, resulted in enough unpleasant conversations with students already skilled in the arts of AI for me to resolve to change my approach in required entry-level classes.

(2) A Total Institutional Ban: Perhaps because he is now a journalist rather than a faculty member, Tyler Austin Harper, with the luxury of idealism, calls for a total institutional ban on artificial intelligence:

“All institutions of higher education in the United States should be animated by the same basic question: What are the most effective things—even if they sound extreme—that we can do to limit, and ideally abolish, the unauthorized use of AI on campus? Once the schools have an answer, their leaders should do everything in their power to make these things happen. ... They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution [including Wi-Fi, smartphones, and laptops]. … Taking drastic measures against AI in higher education is not about embracing Luddism, which is generally a losing proposition. It is about creating the conditions necessary for young people to learn to read, write, and think, which is to say, the conditions necessary for modern civilization to continue to reproduce itself. Institutions of higher learning can abandon their centuries-long educational project. Or they can resist.” - Tyler Austin Harper, “The Question All Colleges Should Ask Themselves About AI”

Or maybe Harper simply has a clear-eyed view of the extent of the problem. 

(3) A Flipped Classroom: Since a total institutional tech ban is beyond my reach, I intend to combine a total classroom tech ban with a flipped class model in my first and second-year courses. Following the lead of many others (see here, here, here, here, and especially here), introductory students will write all assignments by hand in class. 

To be sure, important things are lost in this approach—that is where the grieving comes in—but persuasion is not enough:

“Telling classroom instructors they can have 2022 back, just as long as we implement some new technology, or produce some new syllabus statement, or regale our adoring and compliant students with the “forklift at the gym” metaphor just one more time, is selling them an attractive lie.” - Clay Sharky 

 Blame AI.

If, on the other hand, this change leads to better student engagement in our present moment, something important will be gained.

How will this work? I don’t know. I am not teaching any introductory Biblical Studies courses this semester, so I can postpone decisions on course design for a couple more months. And I haven’t decided how to adjust larger 300-level courses open to all majors (another 2nd semester question).

Dealing with AI is, as Clay Sharky puts it, a “wicked problem” that will take time to solve:

“Faculty do not need to become experts in AI, but they do need to develop opinions about AI informed by their own areas of expertise, and they need to spell it out in the syllabus. We are the ones who have to do this work. ... [N]ow is not the time for purity in our approach. It is not critical that we develop a unified strategy. .... Now is the time for trying something and its opposite at the same time, then talking about what works and what doesn’t.” - Clay Sharky, “AI Is a ‘Wicked Problem.’”

Prayer appreciated. 

For earlier posts about AI, see:

• On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores (13 April 2025) 
• More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing (29 June 2025) 
• An AI-Free Zone (1 Sept 2025) 
• An AI Commonplace Part I: Diagnosing the Problem (30 August 2026) 

 

 

An AI Commonplace Part I: Diagnosing the Problem

“[W]hen we let a computer think for us, we put a gun to the head of civilisation.” - Katherine Rundell

Here are a few links to, and quotations from, articles and essays I’ve found helpful as I prepare to attempt yet again to persuade my students not to use AI in their assignments, and to explain to friends and colleagues inside and outside academia why AI is such a threat. 

It’s one thing to use AI when you are over 40 and know how to think for yourself, quite another when your job is to teach students how to think:

“A formed mind can argue or wrangle with the machine, reject its false polish and recognize when the language it constructs to redescribe the world has become too smooth or soulless. Someone who has lived with words long enough can sense when a sentence has not been earned, and someone who has already developed a voice can use the machine without allowing the machine to become the voice. … We do not wait for children to turn 16 to hand them car keys because cars are evil, and we do not insist that surgeons train for years because scalpels are immoral. We build thresholds around powerful things because power requires judgment, and judgment can’t be downloaded or installed. Before a person asks a machine to write for her, she should know what it feels like to write from the depths of her own uncertainty and identity. Before a person lets a machine imitate her voice, she should have endured the long, uneven, often humiliating process of acquiring one.” - Debbie Millman in the NYTimes

I’m no Luddite, but I’m here to tell you that when it comes to education in the Humanities, there is no upside to Artificial Intelligence:

• “The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care.” - Bret Stephens in the NYTimes
• “AI … risks becoming an iron curtain that comes down between a young person and their potential for thinking, for experiment and conquering frustration, for stamina and for invention – and thereby, between the young people and their freedom. It risks halting learning before it can take flight. Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. … We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.” - Katherine Rundell in the Guardian (read the whole thing)
• “It might be ‘cool’ or ‘innovative’ to teach students to summarize readings with ChatGPT or write essays with Claude. But we may be doing them a disservice: reducing their ability to retain material, think creatively, and reason from what they know. If you only read what AI has summarized for you, you don’t truly ‘know’ the material.” - Sally Sharif

There is a reason why the law school at University of California (Berkeley) has adopted a default policy that bans most uses of AI, that the University of Toronto’s law school is moving to make some courses “laptop free,” and that the University of Chicago has banned “technology in class and AI assistance on coursework” in all of its sociology core courses.

Unfortunately, simply banning AI is not enough. ChatGPT was released in November 2022, when most incoming college and university students were in grade 9. Many if not most first-year students will have used AI throughout high school. The technology is now everywhere and hard to resist:

• “In the first couple years of generative AI, many of us assumed that if we offered students good ways of using these tools, they would adopt those and forgo the lazy ones. Recent studies suggest that many students do neither. Instead, research has confirmed our worries and named them — cognitive offloading, cognitive debt, cognitive surrender, automation bias, illusion of competence, moral disengagement — a menagerie of threats we haven’t been able to protect our students from, or convince them to protect themselves from. If anything, our original concerns were understated.” - Clay Sharky, “AI Is a ‘Wicked Problem’”
• Students are under “enormous pressure to use AI or fall behind those who are.” “They used AI because it was there, because their classmates use it, because they fear if they don’t use it they’ll fall behind, because some professors ask them to and some tell them not to and some look away and some can’t see it when it’s literally right in front of them.” - Jeff Sharlet, “My Students Hate AI. But They Can’t Stop Using It.”
• “[W]e can no longer guarantee that the work students give us is the product of their own minds. Friends at universities around the UK optimistically tell me that they can tell when their students are handing in AI-generated work. But I think we can’t, not from written work alone; for myself, I’m only sure that I can tell when a young person is using AI badly.”” - Katherine Rundell
• “[T]he only reliable pattern I see is this: Whatever evidence faculty learn to trust as proof that a student did the work, a product appears to counterfeit it.” - Susan E. Ray, “The Next Wave of AI-Cheating Technology”

There is a reason why faculty members are demoralized, grieving, and retiring early.

So much for the problem. I outline possible responses here.

For earlier posts about AI, see:

• On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores (13 April 2025) 
• More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing (29 June 2025) 
• An AI-Free Zone (1 Sept 2025) 

 

Hybrid Hebrew at Briercrest

I am happy to announce two new developments in Briercrest College and Seminary’s “Living Language” Biblical Hebrew program.

(1) Semi-Intensive Format: This year for the first time we are offering our four-course (12 credit hour) Hebrew sequence in one year instead of two. Imagine beginning class in September at “Shalom!” and ending in April with a reading knowledge of Biblical Hebrew.

(2) Hybrid Option: We are opening enrolment to online students who will be able to join on-campus students over Zoom in our state-of-the-art hybrid classroom.

Our courses are ABHE and ATS-accredited, so if you are looking to complete language requirements at Briercrest or another college or seminary, but are not able to relocate to our campus in Saskatchewan, you can take all four courses online from the comfort of your home. (For my part, I can’t imagine why anyone interested in the Bible or considering pastoral ministry wouldn’t jump at the chance!)

A Note on our Communicative Approach: At Briercrest, we teach the biblical languages using a communicative or “living language” approach. Among other things, this means class will be conducted, as far as possible, in Biblical Hebrew. Students will spend most of their time in class listening to Biblical Hebrew, and they will learn to speak Biblical Hebrew as well as to read and write it.

This “living language” approach is different from how Biblical Hebrew has traditionally been taught in North America. In conventional language classes, the majority of class time is spent talking about Hebrew in English; students labour over analysing word forms, memorizing vocabulary by rote, and producing their own English translations. The traditional grammar-translation approach appeals only to a small percentage of analytical learners and even at the best of times tends to result in a superficial understanding about how the language works, not a knowledge of the language itself. (There is a reason why most students who study Hebrew in seminary do not succeed in maintaining a long-term reading knowledge of the language!) Our active communicative approach to learning Hebrew is geared to the way people naturally learn languages and results in much more exposure to the language. As a result, it leads to deeper and longer-lasting learning; it also appeals to a wider range of learning styles—and is more fun! (For more detail on this approach as it relates to Ancient Greek, see this post and follow the links back.)

Course Details and Fine Print:

• During the fall semester, classes will run M/T/W/Th at 10:40-11:55 a.m. and F, 1:00-2:15 p.m. CST.
• Homework expectations: Learning any language requires a significant time commitment. You should expect to invest @ 2 hours of homework / class. Most of the homework will consist of watching or listening to the outstanding resources produced by the Biblical Language Center (now part of Whole Word Institute). I can’t promise you a walk in the park; I can assure you that if you put in the time, you will have fun and you will learn.
• Most of the students in the class will be in-person on-campus. The hybrid model with an online option is a pilot project that will require sufficient online enrolment to proceed.

For more information, contact me.

 

Voices on the Liberal Arts (Cont'd): The Scholarship of Teaching

If, as I asserted in my previous post, the study of the humanities—history, literature, philosophy—is vital for the repair of our decadent western society and for the reform of the church, how might one go about reclaiming its historic position at the core of a college or university curriculum? 

Jennifer Frey defines the study of the liberal arts as “a kind of learning that is the cultivation of the higher capacities in a person and the cultivation of those capacities as it were for its own sake, because it is good and important to cultivate them because we’re human.” The problem, according to Frey, “is that we have lost our ability to understand the intrinsic value of engaging in that sort of self-cultivation.”

In a 2018 essay, “Higher Education Is Drowning in BS,” Christian Smith spreads the blame around. From his long list, which you should read if you can access the essay behind the Chronicle of Higher Education’s paywall, I mention two: 

“BS is the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity. … BS is the failure of leaders in higher education to champion the liberal-arts ideal — that college should challenge, develop, and transform students’ minds and hearts so they can lead good, flourishing, and socially productive lives — and their stampeding into the “practical” enterprise of producing specialized workers to feed The Economy.”

Smith attributes many of society’s ills to higher education’s BS problem:

“Ideas and their accompanying practices have consequences. What is formed in colleges and universities over decades shows up for better or worse in the character and quality of our public servants, political campaigns, public-policy debates, citizen participation, social capital, media programming, lower school education, consumer preferences, business ethics, entertainments, and much more. And the long-term corrosive effects on politics and culture can also be repaired only over the long term, if ever. There are no quick fixes here. So I do not speak in hyperbole by saying that our accumulated academic BS puts at risk decent civilization itself.

What is needed, Smith suggests, is a thorough-going clean-up operation:

“Many thoughtful people in higher education today are well aware of different piles of BS around them. Fewer seem to recognize the magnitude of the mounds of it that have accumulated and how badly they defile us. … In my view, genuinely positive changes in higher education, if they ever do happen, will have to combine some forms of visionary traditionalism and organizational radicalism. We will need people with the capacity to retrieve and revitalize the best of higher education’s past and restructure it organizationally in ways that are most effective in the future.”

Ben Sasse, echoing the sentiments in Smith’s essay, blames those responsible for teaching the liberal arts:

“So many universities have had liberal arts colleges captured by ideological activists that really only want to speak to eight or 10 or 17 other ideological activists …. Their power … is increasingly just to compel students to take their classes through the core curriculum. But the classes aren’t very good. They aren’t very big, they aren’t very rigorous. They aren’t big in terms of grand questions. They’re not trying to help people fall in love with the good, the true and the beautiful.”

William Deresiewicz suggests the answer is to recenter teaching at the core of the university’s mission:

“Most college teaching is mediocre at best and often far worse. … Under the research model, faculty are incentivized to do a single thing only: create knowledge. Publish or perish. When good teaching happens, it happens by accident, and often at a cost to one’s career. … [I]f general education is going to be resuscitated—and undergraduate education in general improved, and academia despised a little less—colleges and universities need to start seeing themselves, to an extent they never have before, as teaching institutions.”

There is reason for hope. Deresiewicz’s ideal appears already to exist at St. John’s College, an American liberal arts college that adopted a Great Books curriculum in 1937. I quote from a recent profile of St. John’s College published (behind a paywall) in the Chronicle of Higher Education: 

“The tiny campus offers only one undergraduate major. It has no cutting-edge disciplines or high-tech classrooms. In fact, none of the trappings of modern teaching exist here. Instead students make their way in tandem through a series of texts — most of them foundational to the disciplines — over four years together. The cornerstone is the annual seminar. But students also take four years of math, two of Greek, two of French, two of music, and three of science. St. John’s approach may be unfashionable, but the college has something that many envy: a student body that strives to grow intellectually, embraces ambiguity, and revels in deep reading"

“While there is a tenure process, there are no departments, electives, or expectations that faculty members conduct research …. Tutors [i.e., faculty members] are expected to teach all subjects at some point in their time at St. John’s. As a result, they are fellow learners — reading foundational works and teaching courses in sequence, just as their students take them. … Preparing for class is time-consuming because most subjects are outside tutors’ areas of expertise. Even if you taught the same course before ... you have to prepare as if you haven’t. Because classes are discussion driven, you don’t control where the conversation will go.”

The University of Tulsa honors college that Jennifer Frey helped create was envisaged as a “mini St. John’s.” According to Frey, the program “was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms.” It was also a financial and numerical success: “we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum” as well as “major financial gifts.” Unfortunately, the University of Tulsa’s new administration did not share her vision and the program was gutted two years after it got off the ground. Frey concludes: 

“The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.”

  Coda

(1) What about the cost? It is fair to say the voices I’ve been listening to on the liberal arts are insiders—liberal arts believers operating within or adjacent to the North American higher education system. And it is fair to wonder how much of the conversation about the importance of the liberal arts is self-serving or at least solipsistic. To take one example, the conversation tends not to talk about the financial cost of getting a traditional liberal arts education. Do conversation participants just assume that everyone (who matters) will go to college or university anyway?

(2) Keeping the Faith: I am a liberal arts believer. I am also, and more importantly, a Christian believer. Where can one go to get a solid liberal arts education that is not held hostage by ideologues or actively destructive to Christian faith?

(3) I note in passing that the Christian college where I teach has a fairly robust Arts & Science core, and offers a 4-year BA degree in English, a 3-year Bachelor in General Studies with a strong humanities emphasis, and a one-year certificate in Arts & Science. If you include Biblical Studies (my own field) and Theology, as I do, your liberal arts degree options increase, and the liberal arts core is strong indeed.

(4) The Liberal Arts and liberalism: You won’t find Briercrest advertising itself as a “liberal arts” college, partly because our constituency hears the word “liberal” and worries that the school has strayed from its evangelical Bible college roots. For the record, (a) “liberal arts” does not mean or require liberalism in any sense; (b) Briercrest has not abandoned small-e evangelicalism or its emphasis on the Bible and Christian ministry. 

 

“Don’t Move to a Mental Slum”: Voices I’m Listening to on the Liberal Arts

I have been paying attention to conversations about the liberal arts lately in an attempt to think through why I feel so strongly about the importance of getting a liberal arts education. How do I convince a skeptical eighteen year old that studying the humanities—history, literature, philosophy—is worth it regardless of one’s eventual career? How do I explain to people in my faith tradition why the North American evangelical church desperately needs the liberal arts if it is to avoid the contemporary idolatries of the left and the right?

Here are a few of the voices I’ve found helpful:

Ben Sasse: Everyone should watch, listen to, or read Ross Douthat’s interview with Ben Sasse, the former US Senator, former president of the University of Florida, and committed Christian who is dying of pancreatic cancer. Along the way, Sasse talks about the role of the academy in (American) society:

“Academia’s a total mess, obviously. And yet we need institutions to help people go from being 15 to 17 to 19 to 21. You have to do home leaving, you have to do family formation, you have to do first job, you have to do a ton of habit and character formation stuff. Higher education could be a really, really useful transitional institution. Right now, it enables lots of endlessly deferred adolescent behaviors and not enough rigor and not enough clarity about either research or teaching or character formation. … The answer is not to hate on the liberal arts. The answer is to recover the liberal arts. … But I think the 101 question is: What is the best use of 45 months of an 18- to 22-year-old’s time? Why would we compel people to do anything? It better dang well benefit them and benefit the broader society in terms of the economic output they’re going to produce, but more importantly, the civic engagement that they’re going to be able to have and the love of neighbor and the engagement with a republic — a small-r republic of pluralists who say, ‘We don’t want a polity that’s based on power, we want a whole bunch of people who want to flourish and thrive and build great things in their community.’ And that requires you to be acquainted with some of the wonderful ideas and with beauty in the past — and most of that is way more interesting than anything that is political.” 

“We should be preparing the mind and the character for all of the various vocations and callings in life — and to be prepared for the first job, but also for the third job in an industry that doesn’t even exist yet and won’t for 15 or 20 years.”

Jennifer Frey: Ross Douthat also interviews Jennifer Frey, who was fired without cause from her role as the inaugural dean of what was a successful great books Honors College at the University of Tulsa. In a viral New York Times opinion piece, Frey describes the program this way:

“Our success in Tulsa derives from our old-fashioned approach to liberal learning, which does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives. This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. … At the Honors College, we taught our students that wisdom is a distant goal, and that we need to work on ourselves as we try to approach it. We need to cultivate what our college called ‘the virtues of liberal learning.’ For example, we need to cultivate the humility to recognize that we have much to learn from the past and from one another. We need to cultivate a love of truth for its own sake and the courage to speak our minds and to follow the truth wherever it may lead us — even when it leads us into difficult waters where our disagreements are deep and unsettling. When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it.”

David Foster Wallace: In his famous, “This is Water” 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, David Foster Wallace argued that the point of a liberal arts education is not learning how to think but learning what to think about: 

“[L]et’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about ‘teaching you how to think.’ If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think …. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. … I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. … The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

To be sure, you don’t have to get a degree in the liberal arts to cultivate attention, self-discipline, and the ability to care about other people, but it can help.

Susan Sontag: The title of this post comes from a 1983 Susan Sontag commencement address, now dated in its second-wave feminism, but still worth reading for her comments on the importance of the liberal arts and her concluding peroration:

“Perhaps the most useful suggestion I can make on the day when most of you are ceasing to be students, is that you go on being students—for the rest of your lives. Don’t move to a mental slum. … Keep on reading. … Lay off the television. And, remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don’t have time any more to read—or listen to music, or look at painting, or go to the movies, or do whatever feeds you head now—then you’re getting old. That means they got to you, after all.”

If you have read this far, do yourself a favour and watch Jerry Seinfeld’s rag on “passion” in his 2024 Duke commencement address: 

 HT: Melissa Kirsch

  

The Sisters of Sinai on Learning Ancient Greek as a Living Language

I recently finished reading Janet Soskice’s biography of the twin sister scholars, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, who in their 50’s joined the ranks of the world’s finest Western scholars of Syriac and Arabic, discovered one of the most important manuscripts of the Gospels, the Syriac Sinaiticus, and played an instrumental role in Solomon Schechter’s discovery of the Cairo Geniza.

All this was due, Soskice suggests, to the sisters’ decision to learn ancient Greek as a living language. As children, Agnes and Margaret’s father had made a deal: Learn a foreign language, and we’ll travel to that country. “On this happy plan, and with a twin as a constant practice partner, the sisters mastered French, German, Spanish and Italian while still quite young” (9).

When their father died suddenly in 1866—leaving “his twenty-three-year-old daughters entirely alone in the world, and very rich” (21)—Agnes and Margaret celebrated his memory by traveling up the Nile (in 1869) and determining to learn Arabic.

A decade later, in 1879, the still-single sisters, “threw themselves into the study of [ancient] Greek, … imposing on themselves the discipline of speaking only Greek to each other for days at a time” (56). Instead of the medieval pronunciation system reconstructed by Erasmus, the sisters adopted the current modern Greek pronunciation, following the advice of J. S. Blackie, Professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh. This enabled them to kill two birds with one stone: By 1883 the sisters, “now quite fluent in Greek,” had embarked on a tour of Greece, which resulted in Agnes’s second published travel memoir (56-57).

Marriage intervened for both sisters in the 1880’s. Margaret was married to James Gibson for three years before his untimely death in 1886. Agnes was married to Samuel Lewis for just over three years before his untimely death in 1891. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “to lose one spouse, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

“[O]nly a couple months after Samuel’s death,” Agnes read that J. Rendel Harris had discovered a complete copy of the Apology of Aristides in Syriac at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai peninsula. “Agnes was so interested in this book that she began to study Syriac—not so difficult, she said, if one already had Hebrew and Arabic” (101).

“In January of 1892, less than nine months after Samuel’s death, Agnes and Margaret were in Cairo.” The sisters were able to secure permission from the Archbishop of Sinai to visit St. Catherine’s Monastery “not least because he had, early in their interview, formed the impression that the twins were on a mission to convert the whole of England to the correct pronunciation of Greek” (114). Once at the monastery, they befriended the Greek-speaking monks and were soon granted access to the monastery’s Syriac manuscripts, one of which turned out to be the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the oldest extant Old Syriac manuscript of the Gospels.

Back in Cambridge in 1893—and simplifying a more dramatic story—the 50-year-old sisters “threw themselves into the study of Syriac” (191). By 1894, “[a]fter what must count as one of the most remarkable of middle-aged retraining exercises, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson stepped onto the world stage as oriental scholars of international repute” (200).

Quotations from Janet Soskice, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (New York: Vintage, 2010).

John Wesley on Clergy, Learning and the Biblical Languages

“Men in general are under a great mistake with regard to what is called ‘the learned world.’ They do not know, they cannot easily imagine, how little learning there is among them. I do not speak of abstruse learning, but of what all divines, at least of any note, are supposed to have, viz., the knowledge of the tongues, at least Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and of the common arts and sciences. How few men of learning, so called, understand Hebrew? Even so far as to read a plain chapter in Genesis? Nay, how few understand Greek? Make an easy experiment. Desire that grave man who is urging this objection only to tell you the English of the first paragraph that occurs in one of Plato’s Dialogues. I am afraid we may go farther still. How few understand Latin? Give one of them an Epistle of Tully [Cicero], and see how readily he will explain it, without his dictionary. … And with regard to the arts and sciences: how few understand so much as the general principles of logic? Can one in ten of the clergy (O grief of heart!) or of the Masters of Arts in either university, when an argument is brought, tell you even the mood and figure wherein it is proposed? Or complete an enthymeme? … Can one in ten of them demonstrate a problem or theorem in Euclid’s Elements? or define the common terms used in metaphysics?”

John Wesley, Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion (1743, 1745) as quoted in Stephen Westerholm and Martin Westerholm, Reading Sacred Scripture: Voices from the History of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2016), 290 note 39.

An AI-Free Zone

 

When my students log-in to their course LMS this semester, they will encounter this warning:

This course is an AI-Free Zone: Because I am interested in what you think and in your own learning—including learning to communicate effectively in writing—the use of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grammarly Pro, etc., is strictly forbidden in this class.

All written assignments for this course must be your own work presented in your own words.

Students must be able to talk cogently about their written assignments and their research process. At the professor’s discretion, an oral interview may be required before a grade is assigned for any assignment. Failure to participate in the interview process will result in a 0 on the assignment.

(For good measure, the same statement appears on my syllabi.)

I am not, I think, naïve. I don’t imagine perfect compliance or that I will even be able to tell each time AI is used. I am also aware that this is not a structural change to course assessment: Rather than materially altering my assignments, I am relying on students to choose to follow my class rules instead of turning to the low-hanging fruit that is ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and other Large Language Models that masquerade as “artificial intelligence.”

But here’s the thing: AI-bots are very good at producing the kind of introductory thinking-piece essay that teachers have used for generations. The point in these kinds of assignments is not for students to make a new contribution to knowledge, but to learn as they think through classic intellectual problems on their own. These assignments have been used for so long because they work—or they did work until AI-bots came along. All of a sudden we have to look for alternatives to traditional but effective ways of helping students learn (including summarizing, analyzing, synthesizing, etc.). We may eventually come up with workarounds as good or better than our current approaches to teaching, but we aren’t there yet.

So instead of totally changing the way I teach—and in the process abandoning effective ways of helping students learn—I will try once more to persuade my students that turning to AI to complete assignments in my courses will only hurt themselves.

Here is one more reason why:

With great texts, the reading is its own reward. No potted summary of Plato’s Republic or Homer’s Odyssey will substitute for the real thing. These rich texts can’t be absorbed on a single reading; give them years of attention and they will still have more to say. As a teacher in the Humanities, a major part of my job is helping students learn to read. This includes reading and thinking about difficult texts. Again, it is the struggle that matters for learning and thinking. And so a Cole's notes version or an AI summary will not help students learn how to summarize or synthesize, and it will not get the texts inside them in a way that shapes their lives.

What is true about Plato's Republic is even more true about the Bible, a collection of texts whose meaning and implications cannot be exhausted. As a Christian educator, one of my primary aims is to help people connect with the text of Scripture. The point is not so much the right answer or correct prose, but getting the text inside you deep enough that it can do its inspired work.

Thankfully, in my confessional setting students tend to be open to this kind of argument. Some will continue to cheat themselves (and their professor). My role is not primarily to police the boundaries, but to try and create conditions that will motivate and enhance learning. Wish me luck.

Earlier posts on Education and AI:

• On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores
• More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing
  

More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing

One of the great things about last semester’s sabbatical is that I didn’t have to think about making my assignments harder to outsource to AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT. I did start collecting what others have to say about how Generative AI harms student learning.

Matteo Wong, writing for The Atlantic, puts it well:

A car that accelerates instead of braking every once in a while is not ready for the road. A faucet that occasionally spits out boiling water instead of cold does not belong in your home. Working properly most of the time simply isn’t good enough for technologies that people are heavily reliant upon. And two and a half years after the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI is becoming such a technology. ... Generative AI is a technology that works well enough for users to become dependent, but not consistently enough to be truly dependable. ... For now, the technology’s flaws are readily detected and corrected. But as people become more and more accustomed to AI in their life—at school, at work, at home—they may cease to notice. Already, a growing body of research correlates persistent use of AI with a drop in critical thinking; humans become reliant on AI and unwilling, perhaps unable, to verify its work.  

Alan Jacobs, from whom I got several of these links, agrees:

“Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything.”

The problem, according to Jacobs, is that in today’s universities, “the acquisition of knowledge” competes with the desire for a good job and the desire for a good time. Students turn to AI because they value the “university experience” and the diploma more than education.

According to Jonathan Malesic, Generative AI apps, such as ChatGPT, are gimmicks that falsely promise a shortcut in place of the hard work that true teaching and learning requires:

“I have found, to overcome students’ resistance to learning, you often have to trick them. There’s the old bait-and-switch of offering grades, then seeing a few students learn to love learning itself. Worksheets are tricks, as are small-group discussions and even a teacher’s charisma. … I don’t know anyone for whom it’s a straightforward task. It’s the challenge for any teacher, and AI offers a tempting illusion to students—and evidently to some teachers—that there could be a shortcut. ... Part of a teacher’s job—certainly in the humanities, but even in professional fields like business—is to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds. ... I will sacrifice some length of my days to add depth to another person’s experience of the rest of theirs. ... The work is slow. Its results often go unseen for years. But it is no gimmick.”  

More than a gimmick, GenAI tools and the companies that produce them are actively hostile to learning:

Josh Eyler as quoted in CHE: “Learning is very hard work. It’s a deeply complex process …. If you offload onto AI the very cognitively demanding aspects of the learning process, then like a muscle atrophying, you’re weakening that process over time.” 

Joss Fong as quoted in CHE: “Education researchers have this term ‘desirable difficulties,’ which describes this kind of effortful participation that really works but also kind of hurts. And the risk with AI is that we might not preserve that effort, especially because we already tend to misinterpret a little bit of struggling as a signal that we’re not learning.” 

Lucas Ropek in “Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons”: “[T]he conclusion that using an app to complete a homework assignment makes you less capable of thinking for yourself would appear to be self-evident. Outsourcing mental duties to a software program means you’re not performing those duties yourself, and, as is pretty well established, doing something yourself is often the best way to learn.” 

James D. Walsh in New York Magazine: “It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants.”

And, in the best thing I’ve read on the topic, Megan Fritts writes:

“[T]he work that we bypass when using a calculator is less important than what we bypass when using an AI language generator for writing. To be a human self, a human agent, is to be a linguistic animal. … [T]o learn to use language just is to learn how to think and move about in the world. When we stop doing this—when our needs for communication are met by something outside of us, a detached mouthpiece to summon, describe and regale—the intimate connection between thought and language disappears. It is not only the capacity for speech that we will slowly begin to lose under such conditions, but our entire inward lives. ... [T]he real threat AI poses is not one of job replacement or grading frustration or having to reimagine assignments but something entirely different. ... [L]anguage-generating AI, whether it is utilized to write emails or dissertations, stands as an enemy to the human form of life by coming between the individual and her words. ... Preserving art, literature and philosophy will require no less than the creation of an environment totally and uncompromisingly committed to abolishing the linguistic alienation created by AI, and reintroducing students to the indispensability of their own voice.”

In sum, indiscriminate use of Generative AI—as encouraged by the likes of Microsoft, Google and OpenAI—is inimical to learning and antithetical to human flourishing.

For my earlier reflections on Gen AI and education, see On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores. 

 

On Reading Biblical Hebrew: Advice for Beginners

My advice for students with a year of Biblical Hebrew under their belts who want to launch out on their own:

(1) Read & listen through the passage at least once without stopping to identify forms and unfamiliar words.

• A high-quality recording produced by the Bible Society in Israel can be streamed or downloaded at Bible.is. (The recording is in a modern Israeli pronunciation, which means that distinctions between vocal and silent shewas are not always maintained, etc.)

• Another more traditional recording narrated by Abraham Shmueloff can be accessed here: https://www.torahclass.com/audio-bible-in-hebrew.

(2) Look up unfamiliar forms:

• StepBible provides parsing and an abridged lexicon. (You will want to switch the Bible from ESV to THOT. You can do that manually, or click here: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=THOT.)

• Full versions of the standard (dated but still valuable) Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon can be searched online here:

  • http://www.2letterlookup.com/

  • http://www.ericlevy.com/revel/bdb/bdb/main.htm

(3) Read and Re-read until you can understand the text without looking up forms. I recommend a 1-2-3 reading process. For example, read Genesis 1:1-2 on day 1, Genesis 1:1-2 + 1:3-4 on day 2, and Genesis 1:3-4 + 1:5-6 on day 3. This way each reading will include review and new material.

Finally, some general advice:

• Stay humble. You have learned enough Hebrew to be dangerous.
• Be patient with yourself. There is lots more to learn.
• Form a habit. Reading a little Hebrew regularly is much better than grand ambitions that never get off the ground.
• Don’t stop.
• Have fun!