Welcome to the Hebrew Program

Why Take Hebrew?

If you take biblical Hebrew at LSU, you won’t need an English translation. Much of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is very simple prose, and a student with just two semesters of the language can read many of the biblical stories.

Why read the Bible in Hebrew? For one thing, every translation is an interpretation. If you can read Hebrew, you can better decide for yourself what the literature means. Furthermore, even the best translation fails to convey the full meaning of the text. You can “see” so much more when you read the Bible in its original language. Finally, it is just neat to be able to read one of the world’s oldest languages. A knowledge of Hebrew helps you to imagine how people might have understood the biblical literature in ancient times, two thousand or more years ago.

Hebrew at LSU is a four-semester sequence (HEBR/REL 1001, 1002, 2003, and 2004) that fulfills the foreign language requirements in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (14-16 hrs), the College of Science (8-10 hrs), and the School of Mass Communication.  The Hebrew courses may also count toward the minor in Jewish Studies and toward the major and minor in Religious Studies.