Applied Hebrew Songs — Binyanim

Applied Hebrew Songs

My applied Hebrew songs are intended to help students internalize real, grammatically correct, and meaningful written Hebrew through music. Each applied Hebrew song is binyan specific, only containing verbs in one binyan. There were countless grammatical features that we could have divided the songs by, but writing a song according to binyan seemed the most useful. The purpose is to help students become acquainted with both the sounds of verbs in that binyan through the power of music. Each song is well-documented for grammar and spelling with occasional exegetical notes interspersed. The composition of these songs is original, both in text and music. Writing both the text and music for a song requires large amounts of time, diverse skills, and lots of creative energy. The limitation of only using one binyan forced me to be creative in how I expressed concepts and developed a message for each song. The text of each song is equivalent to a research paper. I performed many Bible word studies to learn the usage and contextual meaning of words. Music composition is hard to compare to written text, but the music for each song is at least equivalent to a paper in its own way. It can easily take as much or even more time than writing the lyrics, and provides an artistic interpretation of my own written text. I wrote the lyrics, composed the music, and recorded the music for the following binyan songs:

1. Nif’al Song. This song is on Job. It was difficult deciding which parts of Job to include. The text, music, and visual art are all part of my interpretation of the passage. It was really fun to blend words, music, and visual art together into a single presentation that engages the student in all these ways. This song probably required the most time. I searched for all nif’al occurrences of pa’al verbs that students learned and documented their gloss. The song uses a total of 26 different nif’al verbs in various conjugations and has 31 footnotes to support the text. 
2. Pi’el Song. I chose to write this song as a worship song. The stage is set with a soloist who recounts God’s work in his life. The choir acts as the voice of truth and can be pictured as the community (in the words of my song, the “sheep”) of God. The soloist begins with a ‘praise formula’ saying how he will bless Yahweh and tell of His name. The choir responds, “Because He is good.” This underlying truth of God’s nature—His goodness—is the basis for the song. It is because Yahweh is good that He uncovers our sin, that we see that we are guilty, that He sent Jesus to atone for our sin, that His blood covers all our sin, that the Bread of Life satisfies the fierce famine of our heart. It is because He is the Good Shepherd that He sought us out when we were lost in our sin, that we (even as Gentiles) are now part of His flock. Jesus consecrated us to be His priests. We can boldly ask Him to fill us with His Holy Spirit and to strengthen us in all that He commands us to do (through the Holy Spirit). Even the Gentiles will praise Yahweh because he has given us all life according to his steadfast love. His goodness has brought us together, each through the same journey as the soloist, to be a kingdom of priests to God. 
3. Hif’il Song. This song resembles Hebrews 11 by recounting the actions of various heroes of faith and what God did for them. The chorus is a praise formula with intentional Messianic tones. We ought to praise Yahweh, make his peace known, and tell the nations that he has saved us. Why? The song begins with Abraham and how he believed in God. God raised up a seed after him. Ruth held fast to Yahweh. She was good to Naomi, and God raised her from the dust. David was a king after God’s own heart. He led the people of God, and Yahweh established his Kingdom. Each figure is part of the narrative that leads up to Jesus, the seed of Abraham, the descendant of a Moabite Gentile, and the eternal Davidic king. Yahweh multiplied Abraham’s offspring through establishing his new covenant with all of us through Jesus. His throne is forever.

Each song includes:

1. The documented Hebrew text arranged in poetic lines with niqqud added.
2. Hebrew text only (with niqqud)
3. A recording of the music for the song.
   • With lyrics for personal listening and singing along.
   • Without lyrics to practice singing by oneself 
   • Songs with several parts have an additional recording with just the music and the parts. This allows students to practice the lead melody with the additional parts serving as an aid to their memory.

Nif’al Song Animation

In addition to writing the lyrics, composing the music, and recording the music for my nif’al song, I decided to create a hand-drawn animated music video to help students understand the song. For this I learned a new software (Procreate Dreams) and did all the animation myself. Animating a ~3 minute video is much like creating an illustrated story book, but is in some ways harder because you must animate the pictures and sync them with the lyrics. I consider the animation alone to be like a paper: it is a powerful means of communication for SLA and required a significant amount of time and creative energy (more than many of my Sattler research papers). The animation can be accessed on YouTube here.