1.That summer I learned Biblical Hebrewwith Christian women heaving themselvestoward ministry one brick building at a time.We got along well, they and I and our teacher,a religious studies graduate student who spenteight hours a day transmitting the grammarand syntactical rules of ancient languages,afternoons training one student in Ethiopic,mornings with the six of us.Biblical Hebrew conveys meaningthrough roots, he taught us. Each rootconsists of three consonants. OK.Some roots appear the same but differin meaning or pronunciation. Oh no,we groaned. Things were getting complicated.The meanings we’d have to look upin our Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicons;the pronunciations we’d learn to recognizethanks to a vowel system long ago standardizedfrom the Masoretic text. When will you teach ushow to look things up? one of us asked.The rest ofor soon. It was a fast-moving intensive.I’d neglected to bring my lexicon to class,it was too heavy, and to tell the truth, I hadnot once opened it since it arrivedaddressed to a former lover from whomthat summer I was subletting.I had addressed it that way so as to avoidconfusion, that of the mail personnel.I had not considered that it might not functionlike a regular English dictionary. Englishwords you look up by first letter,but these you could find only afteryou’d learned to read them for roots.
