Hebrew Quest

Our last story was how Holy Language Institute got started. This is the next chapter, how Hebrew Quest came to be!

I had been teaching my ten-lesson course across Saskatchewan with great success for a couple years when things changed. I was starting to get invitations to teach outside the province and didn't want to because I'm a homebody and also thought that travelling was a relative waste of time. In addition to this, I was starting to get bored of teaching the same material and of driving several hours to and from every class. So I decided to film my course and put it online! I had learned from my students that most of them were more interested in Hebrew as a spiritual experience than as a language, so I determined to make my course the richest and most Messiah-centered experience possible. 

I spent the summer of 2010 crafting my course which grew from ten to forty lessons, building three studio sets in the basement of my grandparents' farmhouse, and assembling props and costumes. Then in the fall I started filming! For the first several weeks I mostly made mistakes as I tried to find my voice and not blink all the time. The archives of Holy Language Institute contain 195 unreleased videos of me manually starting the camera, talking until I stumbled over my words, and then trudging back to the camera to stop and try again. After months of throwing myself heart and soul into Hebrew Quest I finished on 1/11/11 and spent the rest of the cold snowy winter editing and producing the forty lessons before finally releasing them in the spring. And the response was spectacular! Literally tens of thousands of people from over a hundred countries started their Hebrew Quests, with many excitedly talking about how it was changing their spiritual lives. And that was only the beginning!

This snapshot is from the Classroom set where in Lesson 13 I told the miraculous story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who more than anyone else was responsible for the revival of Hebrew as a modern language. The account of how this determined man was supernaturally called to "the revival of Israel and its language" and overcame immense hardships to answer that call was of great inspiration to me in my own work. I already mentioned the technical challenges I faced but there were financial difficulties too. When I first released Hebrew Quest I made the entire program available for free and simply asked for donations, but for reasons I still can't figure out most of my students gave back nothing. This was starting to put HLI in the red and was leaving me feeling increasingly hurt and resentful so, at the encouragement of many people, I reluctantly started charging a small one-time donation for access to the course which, thankfully, was enough to pull us out of the nosedive.

Initially I was deeply disappointed that giving everything away for free didn't work. And honestly, it's still my dream to teach for free and I believe that one day God will turn this dream he has given into a reality. In the meantime our present arrangement creates a more reciprocal relationship between me and my students and also helps them to value their studies more, so it's not all bad. We've also introduced a reduced rates program for people who can't afford the regular rate. This has preserved my original dream by ensuring that everyone can learn with us, regardless of their financial situation. And we're still keeping our regular rates as low as possible too. In fact I'd even say that this has become one of the three things that Holy Language Institute is most famous for - not only are we passionately Messiah-centered and a real community, we're also affordable!

In the next two chapters I'll show you the Construction and Middle Eastern sets I built and filmed in, give you a summary of what I packed into the 55 hours of Hebrew Quest, and tell you what we've done with the course since then. And actually, you don't have to wait until next week to see those other sets and the creative costumes I wore for them - you can watch me in action in the video I put together with highlights from Hebrew Quest, right here:

Hebrew Grammar Quest!

In the last chapter I showed you the Classroom set I built for Hebrew Quest and told you the story of how the program came to be. This is the Construction set where I had way too much fun showing how the language is built, from grammatical structure right down to the subcomponents of each letter! I also promised that I'd tell you what I packed into the 55 hours of Hebrew Quest. As you can see from these summaries, it's basically a big course made up of several smaller courses, all packed into forty lessons! After you look over these I want you to tell me what our weak spot was, like what the course was missing, so read carefully:

Introductory Material (3.5 hours): Introduction to Hebrew, our learning philosophy, and the story of my Hebrew journey.

Alephbet (10.5 hours): Read and write the 22 letters with spiritual teachings on subjects such as how each letter points to Messiah.

Why Hebrew? (2 hours): Seven discussions about the benefits of Hebrew study from the perspectives of discipleship, Bible study, mission, church restoration, the Messianic Jewish movement, worship, and impressing your partner.

Hebrew History (4 hours): Eight discussions about why Jews and the early Christians believed Hebrew was the original language, the language's tracks from Eber to Israel, Hebrew in Second Temple Judea, early Christianity’s link with Hebrew, Semitic New Testament primacy, famous Christian Hebraists, the story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who made Hebrew the language of modern Israel, and the Israeli National Anthem.

Hebrew Names (6 hours): Devotionally pray the Hebrew names of God and Messiah in the Old and New Testaments, learn the Hebrew names of the books of the Tanach, and discover the Jewish names and backstories of the New Testament.

"I love you" (2 hours): Words and phrases of love and friendship, straight from the Hebrew Bible.

Functional Grammar (2.5 hours): Sentence structure, various grammatical terms, and simple and complex verbs.

Tanach Reading (18.5 hours): Read Creation in Genesis 1, Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, Shabbat in Exodus 31, Festivals in Leviticus 23, Priestly Blessing in Numbers 6, Tzitzit in Numbers 15, Shema in Deuteronomy 6, David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17, Elijah and the False Prophets in 1 Kings 18, Psalms 1, 19, 27, 45, and 145, and 100 popular Proverbs!

Hebrew New Testament Reading (5 hours): Read the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6, Jewish blessings for meals, Parables in Matthew 13, the Word in John 1, and the Apocalypse in Revelation 1.

What do you think, was that what you thought I'd cram into the course or were there any surprises in there? Can you see how I tried to make it more than just another basic language course and pack it with  historical information and deep spiritual insights? And...yeah. That strength was also the weakness I mentioned earlier. As you may have noticed, Hebrew Quest was heavy on the teaching and really light on the grammar. 

But that's not where the story ends! Ten years after Hebrew Quest had come out one of our brightest volunteers at Holy Language Institute approached me about creating a second course to supplement Hebrew Quest - a grammar course. I enthusiastically gave him the green light and he proceeded to single-handedly create the biggest and best Messiah-centered multimedia grammar course that I have ever seen! We called it...Hebrew GRAMMAR Quest. There are so many things I could tell you about this but I'd rather just show you. Could I? Watch me going over the 20 things I love most about Hebrew Grammar Quest:

The Ongoing Story

What did you think of our previous story? Honestly I was kinda like oh boy this isn't much of a story, it's more like a syllabus haha. But I am a nerd so what can you expect. At least I got to show you the Construction set where I got way too goofy talking about how Hebrew is 'built' and also show you Hebrew GRAMMAR Quest! And hopefully you checked out that half-hour video compilation of Hebrew Quest highlights too. If you did then you already saw this third set, which is supposed to look like a Middle Eastern tent. And yes, I did try to dress the part. And no, I don't dress like that in real life. And yes there have been people who thought maybe I did which is the only reason I'm mentioning it. Lol.

Anyways this was where we actually got into reading Hebrew together! I always started by lighting my clay lamp and reading this verse comparing the Torah to a light and God's commandments to the lamp that holds the light; it was a really nice little ritual. After that we worked verse by verse through the passage. First I'd slowly read through the Hebrew. Then we'd go back over each word, breaking it down and identifying the prefixes, suffixes, and three-letter verbal roots. Then finally at the end we'd read over the whole passage again at a comfortable pace to consolidate it in our minds. This was actually how I learned Hebrew back in the day and it worked really well for me. I don't think I mentioned this yet but if you're interested to hear more about why I was so passionate about teaching myself Hebrew and how I did it, I tell that story in the fourteenth lesson of Hebrew Quest.

I also mentioned two stories ago that I found something special in my Grandpa's old office at the Baptist church that he used to pastor, but I didn't tell you what it was yet. It was the Hebrew grammar he learned from back in the 1940s, all marked up with his very own pink highlighter! I actually used that book as the basis for my Hebrew Quest grammar lessons and was also able to scan and make it available as a PDF for my students, all of which was very special to me.

The neat thing about the story of Hebrew Quest is that it's ongoing, and not just because we have new people signing up almost every day. I already told you about Hebrew GRAMMAR Quest but that's not the only thing we've done in the last ten years to make the experience even better. For instance, some people weren't able to watch the lessons online. Others wanted to play them for a group. We responded by producing a DVD version of Hebrew Quest which has already been shipped from Saskatchewan to hundreds of locations all around the world!

We also noticed that some students were having a hard time staying consistent with their studies and making it to the end of their Quests. We solved this problem by creating a set of friendly weekly emails inviting our new students to join me for a lesson and making it almost irresistible with sneak peaks of what we'd be covering. 

Another problem we encountered was the question of how our students would remember the hundreds of words covered in our hours of Hebrew reading. Remember the volunteer who singlehandedly created Hebrew GRAMMAR Quest? He solved that problem by creating a massive course using the flashcard method and a gaming format to memorize vocabulary on the Memrise platform which could be played on computer or phone!

There was one more development that really delighted my heart. My good friend Stan who is a Pastor, PhD student in NT studies, and the founder of Greek For All Institute, took the idea of Hebrew Quest and created...Greek Quest! It's perfect for Bible students who want to read the New Testament in Koine Greek, and the sets and costumes Pastor Stan uses make it even more fun. See Greek Quest for yourself below. And after you're done enjoying that be sure to also check out all our Hebrew Quest developments - DVDs, email reminders, graduation program, and Memrise! - on the Hebrew Quest pages!

And that's the story of Hebrew Quest, from a little course that a green kid taught in living rooms across Saskatchewan to an online program through which tens of thousands of people in over a hundred countries have encountered the Jewish Messiah. And who knows, maybe that's still just the beginning.