The SAC is here to pro­vide you with op­por­tu­ni­ties to study He­brew out­side class time. If you need ad­vice and guid­ance on what to study, you should talk to your class tu­tor, who will help you iden­tify your strengths and weak­nesses and make rec­om­men­da­tions on what to study.

A bit about the language

He­brew (עִבְרִית) is a Se­mitic lan­guage of the Afro-Asi­atic lan­guage fam­ily. Cul­tur­ally, it is con­sid­ered a Jew­ish lan­guage. He­brew in its mod­ern form is spo­ken by many of the seven mil­lion peo­ple in Is­rael, while Clas­si­cal He­brew has been used for prayer or study in Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties around the world for over two thou­sand years. It is one of the of­fi­cial lan­guages of Is­rael, along with Ara­bic. As a for­eign lan­guage it is stud­ied mostly by Jews and stu­dents of Ju­daism and Is­rael, ar­chae­ol­o­gists and lin­guists spe­cial­iz­ing in the Mid­dle East and its civ­i­liza­tions, by the­olo­gians, and in Chris­t­ian sem­i­nar­ies.

The core of the Tanakh (the He­brew Bible) is writ­ten in Clas­si­cal He­brew, and much of its pre­sent form is specif­i­cally the di­alect of Bib­li­cal He­brew that schol­ars be­lieve flour­ished around the 6th cen­tury BCE, around the time of the Baby­lon­ian ex­ile. For this rea­son, He­brew has been re­ferred to by Jews as "The Holy Tongue", since an­cient times.