Adult Education With Jack Love
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Maimonides in Life and Literature
Biblical Hebrew
Links to chapters from Understanding Classical Hebrew by J. Love are below. Since this is a copyrighted work, Jack does not especially want it openly available on the Internet, so in order to open these files you must register for access to the KI Member page. Your User ID and password for the Member Page will also allow your access to these documents. If you haven't already registered, you can do that using this link.
* Oral law: When we read the Torah we come upon many passages whose interpretation defies analysis. There are many reasons for this; one of the more common reasons is vocabulary shift where the meaning of a word has changed over time. We see this happening in English usage today; word meaning changes from ancient to modern Hebrew were common as well. Other reasons for the inscrutability of some passages lies in idiomatic usage. The meaning of idioms that were part of the language when the Bible was written are frequently lost to us. A third reason could lie in grammatical structure. The grammar of languages changes over time and passages having certain grammatical structures likely had different contextual meanings when they were composed. Yet another problem occurs when the meaning of nouns is lost. Some nouns used in the Bible have no counterpart in the modern language or in cognate languages and scholars have no way of deducing what the word really means, and the context doesn't always provide good clues, especially if the word is used infrequently.
Despite all these problems, authors of midrash and the Mishnah usually had good ideas about the meaning of many obscure passages. It is likely that the only way early scholars could have had insight into their meaning was through learning the meaning of the passages from their teacher: through oral transmission. In fact, study of the Torah is based on the two principles of written and oral transmission. The work of the Masorites, which began as early as 200 bce with annotations of the biblical text to make the meaning of certain passages less obscure, resulted in the vocalization of the text—providing the vowels and thus standardizing the pronounciation. This work, whose result had the effect of combining the Oral and Written Law (the very act of standardizing pronunciation and word spelling was itself an act of interpretation and commentary), continued to about 1420 ce.
So understanding the Torah (and Bible) ultimately depends on understanding the oral traditions which explain and amplify the written word in addition to understanding the meaning of the actual words themselves. But there still are many passages in the Bible whose meaning remains truly inscrutable. Examples include the story of the "red heifer" (Num. 19:2) and the reference to "Azazel" in the description of the ceremonies for Yom Kippur (Lev. 16:10).
Chart and comment from S. Rayburn
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