Summary: Patterns of Evidence Thinkers have the opportunity to take an online Biblical Hebrew class, free of charge, from Dr. Brian Rickett, professor at Brookes Bible College.
The Levites helped the people to understand the Law… They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading. – Nehemiah 8:7b-8 (ESV)
Free Biblical Hebrew Class for Thinkers
Dr. R. Brian Rickett, featured in The Moses Controversy, is a professor at Brookes Bible College of St. Louis and founder of MIKRA Research Laboratory. At MIKRA, Dr. Rickett employs a team of Christian and Jewish Hebrew paleographers (specialists in ancient handwriting analysis) that conduct analyses of Judeo-Christian textual artifacts, emphasizing Biblical Hebrew manuscripts.
This August, you will have an opportunity to enroll in Biblical Hebrew at Brookes Bible College for free and learn to read the Hebrew Bible with Dr. Rickett. He is an experienced language instructor who has been helping students of all ages and skill levels to successfully learn the language since the late 1990s. Check out the link at the bottom of the article for more information about this online class and to register.
Recently, Tim Mahoney talked with Dr. Rickett to learn more about what he has been up to and to talk about this exciting exclusive offer to take a Biblical Hebrew Zoom-style class from him at no cost. That’s right, if you have signed up to receive free Patterns of Evidence Thinker Updates, this class is being offered to you as a free gift.
You can hear the full interview on Patterns of Evidence’s Podcast (accessible on your favorite podcast platform). Below is an edited version of their discussion.
Edited Podcast Interview
MAHONEY: Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing right now.
RICKETT: I just completed 25 years of teaching Biblical Hebrew, which began way back in California, when I was a student at the Master Seminary. I was invited to teach Spring semester of 1999 for the Logos Bible Institute at Grace Community Church. The first course I taught was Hebrew and I continued to teach Hebrew there. Then I taught Hebrew at the Master Seminary, as well as Aramaic. Eventually, I moved in 2009 to a seminary that was both in Arkansas and Texas. Around 2019, I began teaching for Brookes Bible College.
MAHONEY: Why is it important to learn Hebrew?
RICKETT: I can give you a little bit of my story of how I started that. I am from Arkansas and my family had some land. I wanted to be a cattle rancher on the farm and be outdoors, but my father, who is an electrical engineer, really wanted me to go to college. So I thought, well, if I’m going to have to go, what is it that I want to study? There was nothing, at 18-years-old, that I wanted to study, other than the Bible. It interested me because at the end of life what matters most, is if I served God faithfully. I was thinking about what I wanted to do to make the greatest contribution to the world, the church, and the Lord’s Kingdom, so I went to Bible college. When I took Greek the first time, I thought, man, this is going to require a lot more effort than I’m willing to invest. So I changed my degree program to avoid the languages. I graduated with a four year degree in Bible.
Academic discipline was not something I was really interested in then. When I went to seminary and took Hebrew for the first time, things began to change because my professor was fresh off of the mission field. Dr. William Barrick had translated the Bible into, I think, six different languages, or had at least been on translation teams for that. He showed us how an understanding of the Biblical languages could give us deeper, clearer insight into the meaning of Scripture. That’s what really resonated with me. So I got into Hebrew, reluctantly at first, because I really wanted to know the Word of God. And if you’re a person that really wants to know the Word of God, because you understand that Scripture is the mind of God revealed, then language capacity becomes a tremendous treasure.
MAHONEY: Brian, one of the things we are offering, that you’re making available to our Thinkers, is to participate in one of your classes. Many might not have ever had the time or the resources to go off to seminary and learn Hebrew. And Brian, you are offering an opportunity to learn more about Hebrew and understand the mind of God; the words that he communicated to Moses and to the Israelites.
RICKETT: I wanted to make a course available, free of charge, to whoever wants to enroll in it. I thought, what better group of people than the Thinkers of Patterns of Evidence? The two biggest hurdles people usually cite, for not learning Biblical language, are time and money. I wanted to make this available to people for free, to remove the barrier of cost for those who really want to study, in this case, Biblical Hebrew and Scripture at a deeper level.
South Dakota State Capitol exhibit. (credit: MIKRA Lab).
MAHONEY: What are the details of the class?
RICKETT: It is a live Zoom-style class that meets for 15 weeks starting in August on Tuesdays from 7-9 pm, Central Time. This is a regular college course, meaning we have students who are seeking credit who are enrolling in Biblical Hebrew as part of the fulfillment of their degree requirement. The quality is going to be challenging for anybody, but it is intended to take people from the alphabet itself all the way down to an ability to read Scripture, interpret Scripture, and utilize Hebrew as a tool.
The class is live so you will be able to communicate with people participating from all over the world: Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, the Netherlands and South America. During discussion time, we will learn from each other and how people think about Scripture in Asia, in South America, and then all the way from San Diego to Florida to the northeast.
We start off with the basics. What is the Hebrew alphabet? Where did it come from? This was a subject matter in The Moses Controversy film. It was so pivotal, by the way, I hired Doug Petrovich, who was in the film, a couple of years ago to be one of our faculty at Brookes. So we have more than one Patterns of Evidence alumni at the College.
MAHONEY: This is fantastic. When is the first class?
RICKETT: The class starts August 6 – November 12. Check out the webpage for more information and to register.
Here’s a list of basic things that people will learn in semester one. Students will be taken halfway through a basic Biblical Hebrew grammar book. They’ll learn how words relate: verb, subject, object. Then, they’ll begin the process of building an entry level Hebrew vocabulary. So on day one or day two, they will be reading things like, “See Spot run.” We will start off basic and advance from there. The students will learn to read and pronounce Hebrew from anywhere in the Old Testament. So even in just a few weeks, they’ll be able to open up the Hebrew Bible and read from anywhere in Scripture.
Every week we begin with a devotional thought. From the beginning, we’ll take you straight to Scripture and let you see how a knowledge of Biblical Hebrew will enhance your understanding of God’s Word. The goal is for this whole experience to be a devotional experience. That’s different from what you typically get in a language class. We’re trying to help you to see the delights of the Word of God without any barrier, linguistically speaking, between you and it.
MAHONEY: Are there any resources people need to have in order to attend the class?
RICKETT: We will have a link on the registration page where students can download the grammar book for free. This will be a 100% free course for Thinkers.
ZOOM class in session. (credit: MIKRA Lab).
MAHONEY: In The Moses Controversy we discussed evidence for Moses’ ability to write the Torah. Obviously, the language Moses wrote in was a very early form of Hebrew. Is there a significance to being able to understand the Biblical text in a way that it was originally written?
RICKETT: Yes! Think about how English has changed over the past 400 years. You can take a look at the King James version of the Bible, and see that there have been some significant changes between that version and the English we use today. Imagine a period in history where you have a language being utilized to record information over something like 1400 years: all the way from Job, and the Torah, to Malachi, and there are some changes that occurred from beginning to end.
One of the really great things that you can do, when you begin to delve into the details of Biblical Hebrew, is you begin to understand not just what Scripture says, but how Moses would have said it, or how David would have said it – or Solomon. They each have their own favorite syntactic constructions and favorite vocabulary. You begin to get a sense of the particular terms, such as the vocabulary that David really enjoyed when you read the Psalms. You can see the sophistication and the brilliance of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes when you become familiar with how Solomon wrote, versus the straightforward writing of Moses in the historical narrative books.
MAHONEY: I have eight grandchildren now, and it’s been really interesting to watch as the children start to read and start sounding out words. It’s fun to look at the little five-year-old reading big words. Would your students be able to actually look at the book of Genesis, and once they learn the alphabet, would they be able to read a verse? Is that possible?
RICKETT: Yes, it’s absolutely possible. The genius of the alphabet is that each letter represents a sound, a major advancement in literacy. There were a couple of thousand characters in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and therefore, it prohibited the masses from being able to read and write. But literacy is commanded in Scripture. Whoever it was that developed the alphabet, took 22 characters from Egyptian writing and turned it into the alphabet, making it accessible for people just coming out of slavery to be able to read and write.
I’ll give you an idea of how effective this was. When I began teaching Hebrew 25 years ago, one of my first students was a 13-year-old boy, and I had, in that same class, an 80-year-old man, so both spectrums of life. They both did really well and learned to read and write Hebrew. Then, two summers ago, my young nephews showed up at my house and wanted to spend a few days with me learning Hebrew. So in a matter of two days, I taught an 11-year-old and a 9-year-old the Hebrew alphabet.
Once you learn the alphabet, you can sound out words. It’s completely phonetic, just like in English, but it’s more efficient in that the vowels in Biblical Hebrew were not originally there. Later the Masorites created a whole vowel system, so instead of having A-E-I-O-U, Hebrew has a vowel class A, a vowel class E, a vowel class I, a vowel class O and a vowel class U. So there’s more vowels in pointed Hebrew than in English even.
Hebrew is a fantastic language to learn. In just a couple of weeks, you’ll be able to make out Hebrew letters, to sound them out, and make your way through a verse, even though you won’t have the vocabulary early on to know exactly what you’re reading.
MAHONEY: I hadn’t realized that if you learn to read Hebrew, you might actually be learning how to speak it too.
RICKETT: You’re learning to read it, you’re learning to speak it, and you’re learning to write it. So in a first semester course you’ve learned to do all three of those things.
MAHONEY: I want to invite Thinkers to really consider this class because it’s going to help you in a lot of ways. For one, it’s going to help you to expand your knowledge of the Old Testament. What have been some of the testimonies that people have given after they’ve taken your course?
RICKETT: People generally are in awe over the way that they are able to see the color in Scripture. Learning Hebrew changes your perspective. It is like being accustomed to watching a black and white movie and then, all of a sudden, you gain a color TV or you see a color movie. The color and the nuance that shows up is really impactful, really profound. Those are some of the kinds of things that you’ll hear from people; amazement over how they’re now able to see color and nuance in Scripture that they weren’t able to see before.
MAHONEY: Is there anything you want to share that you’re excited to teach the students in this upcoming class?
RICKETT: There always is, and the thing that is most impactful for me is when you take a look, for example, at poetry. Most believers enjoy the Psalms. When you get into poetry and you begin to see some of the nuance that describes faithfulness to God or the relationship of the worshiper to God and the beauty of that, it’s always really exciting. Conversely, if you take a psalm like Psalm 51, you have David’s repentance of his sin. He uses a wide variety of Hebrew words for sin. He uses a word for transgression, for rebellion, for iniquity, for evil, for all that. So you have David emphasizing a certain component of his sin in a variety of ways. If you read it, a lot of people will sometimes think that there’s no rhyme in Biblical poetry, which is not true.
There is rhyme. It’s just not the most dominant feature. But David does the exact opposite in Psalm 51. Instead of it rhyming, it actually is sort of discordant. It sounds harsh and unattractive, a sound play that you hear along with the content related to the sin he is describing and confessing.
Generally speaking, this course will equip people to have a better appreciation for the Old Testament, as well as, the languages in which it was written. Our class will provide an atmosphere where students can come to know God more deeply. We want to help people develop a more meaningful and mature relationship with God, and reinforce the importance of Biblical studies for that growth.
MAHONEY: That’s great. Anyway, once again, Brian, thank you so much for offering this and for the work that you’re doing. In closing, are there any updates from the MIKRA lab that you’d like to share?
RICKETT: Thank you. Well, we have just finished documenting an Ecclesiastes scroll. This is the first time that we’ve done, specifically, an Ecclesiastes scroll. It is being uploaded this week into our MIKRA app.
MAHONEY: Thank you, Brian. We’re asking that Thinkers really consider this. When you think about what this means, you described it as the mind and heart of God. If you learn Hebrew, you’re going to be as close to that as you possibly can, you’re going to actually grow deeper in your faith, and you’re going to be joining people from around the world that will be on this journey with you in class. Thank you, Brian, for this discussion and this class that you’re offering. God bless you, and once again, Thinkers, keep on thinking.
Again, this Biblical Hebrew class is a regular college course that is being offered free exclusively to Patterns of Evidence Thinkers (i.e. anyone that has signed up to receive free Thinker Updates).
It meets for 15 weeks from August 6 – November 12, 2024 and is a Zoom-style class that meets live on Tuesdays from 7-9 pm, Central Time. Check out the webpage for more information and to register. AS OF MONDAY JULY 15th, THE CLASS IS FULL! Thanks
TOP PHOTO: Dr. Brian Rickett teaches a ZOOM class. (credit: Brian Rickett)
