by Robert W. McDonald

Created on: February 08, 2010

One of the best online resources for learning any language is iTunes University or, for short, iTunes U. “Linked in” through this application are language courses that range from secondary to the university and graduate school-level in just about any language you might want to learn. Since the topic of this article is Hebrew, I’ll use that language to introduce you to the iTunes University Web site. (I’ll assume that you are using some flavor of Microsoft’s Windows Operating System).

If you don’t have the iTunes software installed on your computer, you need to visit the iTunes home page (http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/) to download the latest version (as of now, the 9.0.2 version) of the free iTunes for Windows. This is about a 100Mb download and the installed footprint is about 150 Mb, at least on my Windows Vista machine.

Once you have iTunes installed, you will see a group of drop down menu tabs along the top of that default page that loads when you access iTunes. On the right side of those drop downs, you should see one that’s labeled “iTunesU.” Click that tab to load the iTunes University start page. In the upper right corner of the iTunes University page you should see a link that reads “Quick Links” and, under it, a link that says “Universities and Colleges.” Click on that link.

You should arrive at a page with an alphabetical listing of schools that are using iTunes University to broadcast their free access courses. From that page, find and click on the link to “Concordia Seminary.” This should get you to the Concordia home page.

On the Concordia home page you will probably see an icon for Dr. Andrew Bartelt’s “Fundamental Biblical Hebrew” course. (You may not see the icon because the page layout might have changed since I wrote this. Click on the icon titled “Exegetical Resources” and you should see it there). You are now on the course page of what is, in my opinion, the best introductory-level Biblical Hebrew course in the Internet.

This course, which is part of a mandatory semester-long “pre-seminary” Biblical language qualification at the St. Louis, MO, Concordia Seminary (Lutheran, Missouri Synod), assumes that you know absolutely nothing about Biblical Hebrew.  It is well-organized and is presented in “blocks” of video instruction running from a few minutes up to a half-hour each. I found it to be easier to download each “chapter” to my hard drive and then view them whenever I wasn’t pressed for time.

For serious students of scripture, I also recommend another course that’s also available from the Concordia Web site: Dr. James Voelz’s “Fundamental Greek Grammar.” It’s the same high quality instruction as in the Hebrew lectures and, trust me on this one, it saved me from a lot of grief when I took a year of New Testament Greek.

The courses that I mentioned are only two of the literally hundreds of college-level lectures and demonstrations that are available through iTunes University. If you give these courses a try, I’m sure that you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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