HEBREW QUEST
HEBREW QUEST
Our last story was about Holy Language Institute: how we got started and how far we've come. This is the next chapter, how our foundational video course came to be! You could jump over right now and see Hebrew Quest for yourself at holylanguage.tv (our gorgeous video platform I told you about in the previous story), but why not read on first to learn more and hear the backstory?
I had been teaching my ten-lesson Hebrew 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 the spiritual aspect of Hebrew than the linguistic side, so I determined to make my course the richest and most Messiah-centered spiritual 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. In the classroom set I'd show how every Hebrew letter pointed to the Messiah, talk about the supernatural history of Hebrew, and journey devotionally through hundreds of the Hebrew names of God and his Messiah. In the Construction set I'd show how the language was built: from insights into the structure of every letter, to numbers and grammar. And finally, in the Middle Eastern tent set I'd light my clay lamp and then read word-by-word through popular passages from the Old and New Testaments in Hebrew.
Finally, it was time to start filming. For the first several weeks I mostly made mistakes as I tried to find my voice and not blink all the time. Case in point: 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. That's almost 200 fails! But I persevered, and after months of throwing myself heart and soul into Hebrew Quest, I finished on 1/11/11. I spent the rest of that cold snowy winter editing and producing the forty lessons of Hebrew Quest. Finally, in the spring of 2011, not long before I turned 30, I released them. 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.
Some of the things I included in Hebrew Quest were especially precious to my own heart. One was the story of my own journey into Hebrew, which you can hear for yourself in Lesson 14. Another was - well, remember in the previous story how I was teaching Hebrew across my home province of Saskatchewan? One of the places I taught was in was my Grandpa's old Baptist church, and while he had already gone to glory, my Grandma was able to join us, which was special. But as if that wasn't enough, after everyone had left I nostalgically wandered around and found myself in my grandfather's old office, looking through all his old books which had been left where they stood. And there on the dusty shelves, I found the Hebrew grammar he learned from back in the 1940s, all marked up with his very own pink highlighter. The new pastor let me take it home and scan it, and it was from those scans that I taught the grammatical portions of Hebrew Quest.
Having said that, grammar really wasn't the strength of the Hebrew Quest program. As I mentioned earlier, I was more focused on showing my students the spiritual side of the language and getting them reading and experiencing the Hebrew Scriptures for themselves. But that wasn't the end of the story! A full ten years later Chris Flanagan, who was 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 ever produced! We called it...Hebrew GRAMMAR Quest. You might not be very excited about Hebrew grammar, but watch my introductory video showing you the 20 things I love most about Hebrew Grammar Quest and that might change.
As if that wasn't enough, Chris also took the many thousands of words and phrases we covered in Hebrew Quest, and enabled our students to lock them all in their long-term memory! How? By creating another massive supplementary Hebrew Quest course on Memrise, an app that enables people to learn languages using the flashcard method and a gaming format. When you check out Hebrew Quest be sure to read the Course introduction at the top of the page (you'll have to tap 'Show more' to see it all) because that's where I'll give you the links to the Memrise course. That introduction will also give you more information on what exactly you'll experience in each of the forty lessons. Chris did so much to light up Hebrew Quest with these grammar and vocabulary courses that I gave him the clay lamp I used in the original Hebrew Quest course as a symbolic gesture of gratitude.
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.
Start your own Hebrew Quest today. You're right, it will take time and hard work. But I promise you this: it will be worth it, and you won't regret it. Learn more and get started here: