“Hebrew is not a dead language,
Breathing with people of the Bible era
It is a living language.”

"Hebrew Classes with Professor Song Min-won, an Ancient Near Eastern Linguist"

I will never forget the moment when the Hebrew Bible first revealed itself to me.
The Hebrew I encountered then felt like a raw language.
The closer the distance between each word and the reality it refers to, the more 'primitive' the language feels.
The language that I had previously found difficult and unfamiliar became familiar to me in that moment, like the words of a child, like the voice of a grandmother telling a lullaby of old stories.
Genesis 1 unfolded before my eyes, transcending language and time differences.
It felt like I was witnessing the moment of creation with my own eyes.
That moment changed the course of my life.
That experience led me to Old Testament studies and Ancient Near Eastern studies, and has led me to a life of studying and teaching Hebrew and the Bible for over 20 years.
This book, “Time in Hebrew,” is the fruit of this process.

Learning Hebrew is not only an intellectual exercise, but also a spiritual one.
This is not to say that this language has some mystical power.
This is because learning a foreign language forces us to break out of our comfort zone.
When you live a life of faith for a long time, you start to want to settle into the familiar ways you've always done things.
I call it 'inertial faith' or 'the inertia of faith.'
Music majors deliberately train themselves to listen to irregular rhythms and dissonant sounds.
It is a training to break out of the familiar frame and open your ears to unfamiliar sounds.
Learning Hebrew is like this.
Learning a foreign language forces us out of our comfort zone.
Coming into contact with Hebrew will be a kind of spiritual training, as you will hear God's unfamiliar voice, outside your usual range of sounds.

The reason we came to understand the Torah, which means 'teaching' and 'guidance', with a legal meaning is because Christianity was transmitted to us through the Greco-Roman cultural lens.
The Septuagint, when translating the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek, adopted 'ν?μο?' (nomos) as the translation for Torah.
This is a word that means law, and it includes both written law and unwritten customary law.


Rome, which followed Greece to dominate the world, particularly pursued simplicity and clarity in its culture, so it elaborately organized and systematized the rules of society as legal provisions.
The New Testament era unfolds against the backdrop of the clash between Greco-Roman culture and the Hebrew culture of ancient Israel.
The fact that the Torah, a comprehensive yet vague concept of 'teaching' and 'guidance' in ancient Israel, was understood as 'law' or 'ordinance' in the New Testament era is because it underwent such cultural refraction.

Besides Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, there is another expression in the Bible where God reveals himself.
It is a divine name that is so common and familiar that it does not give any sense of mystery.
This is the expression, “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:15).
God, who exists beyond the created world, expresses himself by putting forward the names of the creatures he created.
It seems rather poor and shabby to come after the wonderful expressions “I am that which I am” or “I am that which I am.”
It would be understandable if Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as testified in Genesis, had been ideal men of faith, but in reality, these 'fathers of faith' were not people of such great faith.


These are people who sold their wives to save their own lives or deceived others for profit.
In particular, Jacob, from whom the name 'Israel' comes, was a coward.
He even showed his sons who had returned after taking revenge for his daughter's death by trembling and saying, "Because of you, I am going to die" (Gen 34:30).
Even in his later years, he was a man who prioritized his own hunger and his own life (Gen. 43:2, 12-14).
Yet, this incomparably great God reveals himself as the God of these insufficient people.
And he adds that the name “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” is God’s “everlasting name” and “my title to be remembered from generation to generation.”

The word for red land is also 'adamah', which comes from the same root.
Unlike 'Eretz', which generally refers to land, 'Adama' refers to fertile land suitable for farming.
To the people who lived in ancient Canaan, the soil was divided into two main types: white and pale soil and red soil.
The biggest difference between these two soils was whether they were suitable for farming or not.
The light-colored soil is a desert where plants have difficulty growing, while the red soil is fertile.
If you compare the two photos above, you can see that the soil in the bottom photo is noticeably red.
Both photos were taken in the Timna Valley in southern Israel.
It is a place where two different colored soils coexist.


Unlike the desert, this red soil was fertile and allowed crops to grow well.
The ancient Israelites seem to have believed that the red color of the land (adamah) was due to the light soil holding 'blood'.
Since life is in the blood, it was thought that the land soaked in blood could foster life.
This way of thinking expanded further, and those with redder skin than others became symbols of strength and excellence.
In this context, the word used to describe the red skin of David (1 Sam. 16:12, 17:42) and Esau (Gen. 25:25) is 'Admoni'.
--- From Chapter 1, “Understanding God Reflected in Hebrew”

The interpretation of Song of Solomon 1:5 began to change gradually with the rise of the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
Black theologians have taken issue with the interpretation of “black but beautiful.”
Why on earth isn't black beautiful? This influence has led to the emergence of new translations.
The NRSV published in 1989 revised it to “I am black and beautiful,” and the ISV published in 2000 also translated it the same way.
Also, the NASB, which pursues a literal translation, showed moves such as revising the existing translation “I am black but lovely” to expressions similar to those in the NRSV and ISV when it published a revised edition in 2020.


And the CEB, which came out in 2010, also translates the expression in the Agatha as “Dark I am, and lovely.”
Among the Korean Bibles, the New Translation showed the possibility of a new interpretation by translating this passage as “I am pretty because I am black.”
This translation actively reflected the interpretation of black theologians that “I am black, therefore, beautiful” by adopting an interpretation that goes beyond simply “black and beautiful” to “I am black, therefore, beautiful.”

The question of whether to view a butterfly as a 'prophet of the future' or as a 'person to whom the word of God has come' becomes an important criterion for determining how to view the prophetic books of the Bible.
Let's take the book of Isaiah, a representative prophetic book, as an example.
If we read the book of Isaiah with a focus on the "future," it can be seen as a book prophesying the restoration of Israel and the coming of the Messiah, and only a very small number of verses in Isaiah fit this context.


Most of the book of Isaiah is a story of the past, pointing out how wrong God's people, Israel, have been before God, and a story of the present, calling on them to correct their actions before God.
And right now, there is a story of the 'future' written, declaring what will happen when we follow God's commands and when we do not.
In short, the book of Isaiah contains God's word about Israel's past, present, and future.
--- From Chapter 2, “Human Understanding Reflected in Hebrew”

There are two major ways in which the Hebrew blessing differs fundamentally from the blessings of other languages ​​and cultures.
First, it describes the attitude of the person receiving the blessing, not the actions of the person giving the blessing ('speaking good words' or 'sprinkling blood').
Interestingly, the blessings the Bible speaks of are not actions that begin with God giving them.
Rather, it begins with our posture of kneeling and prostrating ourselves before the Lord.
The question is not 'what' God will give us, but 'what attitude' we have.
Therefore, if we translate the Hebrew word barak into Chinese characters, it is closer to the Chinese character for ‘prostration’ (伏) than the Chinese character for ‘fortune’ (福).

--- From Chapter 3, “Hebrew Thought in Linguistic Expression”