About three months ago, I began memorizing Psalm 119 in the original Hebrew. This has been a very interesting project and so far I am only up to verse 12. Here are some things that account for my apparent slow progress:
- When I began, I did not know Hebrew. I did not even know the Hebrew alphabet. So much of my time and attention so far in this project has been spent learning Hebrew, its alphabet, its grammars (how to conjugate verbs and decline nouns), its ancient definitions and etymology of the roots (root words), etc.
- At 65 years old, my memory doesn’t work as well as it did when I was much younger. My memory has never been anything to brag about, but it is even worse now. This deficit requires MUCH repetition. I write out (from memory) all the verses I know every day (and then I check them for mistakes), and I pray and meditate over them in my mind throughout the day as I have opportunity to do so. This reinforcement is necessary to keep them accessible in my memory.
This is not an exercise that I would lightly recommend to another Christian. It requires a dominant commitment and lots of time and a focused unrelenting priority in your daily schedule—at least it requires all this of me. And I anticipate it will continue to require this level of commitment and time for at least the next two or three years (after all, there are 176 verses in this Psalm).
The value is enormous! There is so very much happening in the Hebrew that is not really translatable into English. Given that this Psalm was the daily devotional prayer of Jesus Christ, this exercise of delving deeper into the original Hebrew has provided a lot of new insights into things like:
- The specific pictures in Jesus’ mind as He prayed each verse.
- The emotion and focus and emphasis that accompanied these prayerful pleas as Jesus prayed each verse, even each word, of this Psalm.
- The connection between verses in one octet to the companion verses in other octets becomes more evident and thereby helps to illuminate the thematic flows in this Psalm.
- Many nuances that are lost in translation, become evident when you study this Psalm in the original Hebrew. So, the depth and breadth of understanding is enhanced.
Bottom line: If you are highly motivated to get to know Jesus better and a lot more intimately, if you are driven to deepen your personal relationship with Him, then this would be one way to do it.
I expect that the lessons and insights I am getting from this project will work their way into a later edition of my book Behold the Christ, but that next edition is likely a few years away from being released. In the meantime, I plan to use this blog as a way to pass along many of these new insights to my faithful blog readers. So, stay tuned.