The first four blog posts summarizing the argument in Reasons Christians Should and Can Learn Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical Languages explained the value of learning the Biblical languages.  Clearly, knowing the languages is valuable.  However, are they learnable?  Aren’t Greek and Hebrew too hard to learn?

Actually, Greek and Hebrew are emphatically NOT too hard to learn.  They are not too hard because of the following reasons, summarized from pages 40-51 of Reasons Christians Should and Can Learn Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical Languages:

1.) Christians have their Almighty Father to help them learn the languages.

2.) The self-discipline involved in learning the languages can contribute to their sanctification.

3.) Scripture is not God hiding Himself. The Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament are God’s “revelation,” not God’s obscuring Himself.

4.) For century after century, Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek were the languages of the common man, not of the elite few.

5.) A very high percentage of Koine Greek speakers picked it up as a second language, while having a different native tongue.  So can modern English speakers today.

6.) The Hebrew Old Testament was comprehensible to the simple rural folk that comprised the large majority of Israel.

7.) The Greek New Testament was comprehensible to the slaves and lower class people who constituted the large majority in the first century churches.

8.) It is harder to master modern English than it is to learn to read the Greek New Testament or Hebrew Old Testament.

9.) English speakers assume English is an easy language while Greek and Hebrew are allegedly difficult, but their assumption is invalid–because we have already mastered English, we do not think much about what was involved in learning the language.  Someone starting from scratch would more easily learn to read Greek or Hebrew than he would learn to master modern English.

10.) The vocabulary of the average four-year-old child is larger than the number of words one must learn to gain a solid grasp of the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Old Testament.

11.) The inspiring examples of those who learned the languages as children, or without grammar books, or despite extremely pressing work commitments, or in the face of other hardships, show that learning the Biblical languages is eminently attainable.

12.) Numbers of countries world-wide are officially trilingual, while fifty-five nations are officially bilingual.  There is no reason why people in these countries can master two or three languages in order to make money and efficiently function, but Christians cannot learn Greek and Hebrew in order to better know God and His Word.

The facts above are important, both to encourage people who are contemplating learning the languages and to refute Ruckmanite notions that Greek and Hebrew are impossibly difficult, so one must simply stick to English, not even use Greek or Hebrew lexica, and ignore the treasures God has laid up for His people in the Hebrew and Greek tongues.

–TDR