I hope present day students of biblical Hebrew appreciate what they enjoy today. I hope they recognize they stand on the shoulders of poverty-stricken Hebrew students of old, such as ME in 1997. Most likely they do not, but they are products of, as one of my profs would say, our Oprah-ized culture with a sense of entitlement. “If I can’t download it for free, that’s an injustice.” I’m sure there’s a hashtag going around something like #freehebrewvocab. I’m just sure of it.

Ok, that was all sarcasm! 🙂

But seriously.

In 1997 I was a very poor seminary student with four kids three and under (had a set of twins there, hehheh). And I was starting second year Hebrew. Fall semester was Hebrew Syntax, and one of the required books to purchase was George Landes’ A Student’s Vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew. I still have it, check out these pix–

Nice little booklet, eh? When my books arrived at the Inter-City Christian Bookstore (always an exciting pre-semester moment!) I picked up that little booklet, looking forward with anticipation to learning my Hebrew vocab, and then saw the price tag–

WHAAAAAAATTTTTT!!!!!!!????!!!!!!!!

$28.75???!!!

“Sorry Trish, no diapers for the kids for a few weeks. I had to buy a 56 page pamphlet instead.”

This morning I was working through Deuteronomy 20, and of course couldn’t remember some of the Hebrew words. I did a quick search for “free Hebrew vocabulary PDF” (whoops, #freehebrewvocab, hehheh).

What’d I find?

Academia has Landis’ work for free.

They got it from pdfdrive.com.

I hope current day seminary students enjoy all this free stuff, and I hope they have lots of kids and those kids are thankful for food and diapers. 🙂