Why Study Biblical Languages?

Joe Carter’s link to that article back in December generated some heated comments at First Thoughts. A foreign language “helps one understand one’s own past,” one reader wrote. “If you are concerned about practical matters,” wrote another, “intensive instruction courses in Chinese or Japanese or Korean . . . would be in order.” In this battle, the modern European languages stand on one side of a bright line separating the “intellectual hobbyists,” as one commenter called them, from those who value global competence, which demands knowledge of major non-Western languages. On the same side as the Henry James school but on the far side of it are Latin, ancient Greek, and biblical Hebrew—classical languages that, being sacred and “dead,” are a harder sell even than French or Italian, at least to those whose allegiance to the secular and the present entails a disregard of the sacred and the past.

Underlying much of the disagreement about the value of learning these languages as opposed to those languages is the difference between calculative thinking and meditative thinking. In the tone of some of the comments you could hear the tension between those who want to savoir things—to acquire knowledge broadly, knowledge in the sense of information—and those who want to connaître them, to know them deeply, or intimately, in the sense in which we know our spouse or siblings or closest friends, the people we love.

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