@Kazark Welcome back!

@MonicaCellio Thank you! I will be curious to see if you or one of our other Hebrew gurus can help me out on Psalm 137. I love the Psalm but want to grow in my understanding of it.

I'm trying to learn Hebrew, but it is quite different than the other languages I know.

Latin in high school made Greek in college a breeze

but Hebrew is another thing altogether!

@Kazark I'm interested in your Ps. 137 question too. I think there's more than just Hebrew interpretation going on; we probably need a dose of historical context. So far I'm feeling under-qualified to address this question using either approach. If you don't get an answer here I'd like to encourage you to try Mi Yodeya.

@Kazark Hebrew is pretty different in my experience, yeah. The only other language I ever studied -- for a couple years in high school -- was Spanish; I never reached fluency, of course, but it didn't really help much when tackling Hebrew.

I found a book that really helped me grok Hebrew grammar despite these limitations -- for each grammatical construct, it explains how that works in English and then how it works in Hebrew, with examples, so even if you always thought tense and aspect and mood (?) were the same thing, if you ever thought of them at all, because English doesn't, I could understand the differences in Hebrew with this book. (Need to look up the name, sorry.)

@MonicaCellio Aspect and tense, you mean?

Thankfully, as my father is a linguist, I have known for a long time they are not the same thing.

That is a far shot from understanding the Hebrew verb system, tho,

which as I have only begun to study it is still quite a mystery to me.

If you do find the name of that book, I would be very interested.

If I don't get any good answers after a while, I definitely should try on Mi Yodeya.

The other thing I'm thinking of doing is passing the question along to my two pastors, both of whom are very learned

given that they don't work at a university

but for a church were they have a lot of hands-on ministry to do.

They are two of the more learned pastors in variety of churches I've been in,

and the one in particular is pretty good with his languages.

Neither of them participate on this site, but I could see if I could get permission to post their answers.

I know two Eastern languages but neither of them are Semitic,

and Semitic languages are another thing altogether, it seems.

Also, I agree that an answer on my 137 question would be most helpful if it had historical background.

@Kazark amazon.com/Grammatical-Concepts-101-Biblical-Hebrew/dp/…

@Kazark ah, parental linguist -- you have a leg upon me, then. :-) (I did get a little help from linguist coworkers, but the benefit of learning things steadily over time, and as a child, seems significant.) I meant aspect and tense, and I also remembered that there was something called "mood" or "modality" that seems to be intertwined with verbs, but it looks like a different concept. Still not a linguist, I'm afraid.

It does discourse analysis too!

Hurrah!

Thanks for sharing---

@Kazark the binyanim, the seven forms of verbs (simple, reflexive, passive, causitive, etc) are hard to understand. I'm not proficient in them yet either; I recognize some of them when I see them, and I know they're out there so I know to look, but it's still hard.

that is going on the Amazon wish list...

@Kazark it looks like he's coming out with a new edition in February (according to Amazon). Oh, and it looks like he's done Greek too. Check it out. (Greek is, well, all Greek to me...)

Oh, Greek too? Let me see...

amazon.com/Grammatical-Concepts-101-Biblical-Greek/dp/…

@Kazark so says Amazon. :-) I don't know anything about it, but I would imagine he takes a similar approach. (I wonder if he reuses the English parts?)

Yeah, interesting.

Put that on my wishlist too, tho I am more eager about the Hebrew one because my Greek needs polishing while my Hebrew needs all the help it can get, haha...

Yeah, we'll see if I can get an answer from them. If nothing else, I can get a verbal answer from them and use it to compose an answer myself.

@Kazark I hope they can help.