I've learnt Biblical Hebrew and in recent years have reaped great benefit by singing Hebrew songs. Compared to my earlier stage of learning Hebrew without singing, the contrast is great. Song is a great help to memorize conjugations, prepositions, and vocabularies. Moreover, those songs can be sung sincerely as worship to God, or as an expression of joy, prayers or supplication. Thus this language grows less and less "foreign," because it becomes more and more one of my "heart-languages."
For Biblical Hebrew, there are hundreds if not a thousand such songs with words from the Bible. I guess it's because Hebrew is alive and the Jewish people have been worshipping God with songs for centuries, until now, and will continue to do so. Naturally, Biblical Hebrew worship songs abound and I have good hope that in the future I can enjoy listening to and singing new Hebrew worship songs too.
I hope to find such songs for Koine Greek, but so far not very successful. The ones I've found usually has one of the following properties:
- dry, without emotion, obviously only intended to be a learning tool
- without instrumental music to accompany it
- quite long and complicated, like a whole hymn sung in a grand cathedral, rather than a simple song which one can hum while doing household chores
- sung by one person only, the teacher himself
- like chants which are from very old traditions which I cannot easily sing it as my own heart's voice
- in Modern Greek, whose system of pronunciation is different
- translation of an existing English worship song, so there's copyright limitation. One cannot sing it with a guitar and record it and put it on the web.
So I wish someone will produce Koine Greek songs for worship and prayerful singing.
Perhaps those good songs by teachers like Steve C. Singleton can be sung by a group together with guitar or piano accompaniment, possibly sung in parts to make it sound nice. Then it can be put on YouTube, so people can listen to it on and on without the English explanation intervening.
Perhaps a group of students can create such a song together, and then sing it with guitar playing, and record it and share it on YouTube. If there are several student groups doing this, all students learning Koine Greek--not least seminary students who are to love the Greek NT-- in the world can benefit.
I've drafted two Koine Greek songs with such thoughts in mind.
One sings that "the Lord is my helper, I shall not fear. What can man do to me?" One sings that "in yet a little time, the Coming One will come and will not tarry, but my righteous people will live by faithfulness." Both are taken from the Book of Hebrews.
