Now at some previous point in my life it may have mattered that my zodiac sign is Gemini, that I'm more of a Type A than Type B personality, that I was born in the year of the dragon, or that my Meyers-Briggs profile is ENTP. But these have given way and faded into insignificance since the onset of my career in biblical linguistics. Not, mind you, because we dismiss out of hand foolish superstition or reductionistic psychologism. (If only!) It's because at seminary, personality typing is based on language preference. One is either a Greek personality or a Hebrew personality.

Let it be said that these motifs have almost nothing to do with the respective thought-worlds they represent: it's not a philosophical dispute between the ethical monotheism of struggling-with-God prophets on the one hand and the ethereal flights of ontological fancy on the other. Nor is it a matter of preference for one testament over the other. (We're studying to be pastors and preachers of the Bible, after all; you just don't say that you think Zephaniah is dull or the Second Epistle of John incomprehensible.) These types are based solely on the grammar of the languages. I didn't believe it at first. I came to sem with a year of college-level koine Greek under my belt, whizzed through the qualifying exam, and gleefully signed up for Hebrew. I'd always been good at languages and loved the exotic look of the new alphabet I was undertaking.

Then a middler (that's the second-of-three-years student at seminary) stopped me at the door to the registrar's office with a look of pastoral compassion in his eyes. "Have you already taken Greek?" he asked worriedly. "Of course," I said, baffled by his concern. Who takes Hebrew without having taken Greek first anyway? It just isn't protocol.

"Did you like Greek?" he said.

"Yeah, I guess," I replied. "I never really thought about it, but sure, I liked Greek."

"Well then," he breathed onimously, "you can expect to hate Hebrew." Naive junior that I was, I wrote off his warning, but it took little more than a week to figure out that he was on to something. Upon careful inspection, I realized that the language I thought so exotically pleasing to the eye really resembled chicken scratch, a pile of twigs, or heaps of broken pretzels. A completely unfamiliar sensation of doom descended upon me as I floundered my way through the alphabet. Why must he, het, and taw all look so much alike? What's the difference between final kaph, nun, and pe? Yet that was nothing compared to the grammar, complex enough, I thought, to adequately reflect the thoughts of God. For starters, there are no absolute times in the tenses, just these cloudy and mysterious "aspects"... well, all times are but a moment to God, right? The letter nun can be ruthlessly sucked into the next letter, like the Borg assimilation on Star Trek, as my prof explained. Final he's can turn into yod's and first yod's used to be waw's. The oddly named conjugations are so random that the same exact word can mean "to begin" in Piel and "to profane" in Hiphil. Hebrew has all the consistency of the people Israel in the time of the prophets. I felt about as patient as Jeremiah.

My academic situation was not much improved by the exuberance of my preceptor (what they call teaching assistants here), who clearly had a textbook Hebrew personality. "Greek is dry, lifeless, and mechanical," he would gloat. "But Hebrew lives. It breathes. It gets deep into the recesses of your psyche [a Greek word, I noted with irritation] and blossoms like Mt. Gilead in the springtime. It is the language of languages. You don't need formulas and paradigm charts for Hebrew. You just intuit it." In other words, Hebrew is a touchy-feely language when it comes to grammar. It was about then that I saw the handwriting on the wall - and it wasn't spelling out "easy A" for me. The rest of the semester was an exercise in humility, no doubt an important exercise in ministerial training, if not actually conducive to reading the Old Testament in its native tongue.

For awhile I alleviated the stress of being a non-Hebrew personality in a Hebrew class by getting in touch with my inner Greek nature. I began to feel new appreciation for the arete (ha! so there!) of my patron language. None of this highly subjective "intuiting" for me. Greek is as straightforward as math. Its rhythm and simplicity, I saw, are what makes it beautiful. The conjugations are blessedly predictable. Neatly divide the root from the present indicative ending, insert a little sigma between them, and eureka! The future tense. Need to express something a little more complex? The future passive, a grammatical somersault if ever I saw one, employs the highly predictable QH plus standard aorist ending. Nouns are lovely too: the genitive plural always announces its presence with - TWN. Even the irregular third declension makes sense once you get the hang of it. It takes no time to sight-read Greek, whose alphabet is quite similar to our own; a year later, I'm still sounding my way through Hebrew. Greek is sensible; rational; methodical. You can see how stately Grecian architecture, pediments and Corinthian columns and all, sprung out of such a solid grammatical foundation. This is the language that would spontaneously generate philosophy, that would posit perfection in forms far removed from earthly fallibility, that would create plane geometry.

Sure enough, real life soon invaded on my idyllic projections about the linguistic perfection of Greek. Unwittingly counteracting my self-perception as having a basically Greek orientation, I also took a class on the exegesis of the Gospel of St. Mark. It was deeply distressing. I began to think that however great his theological virtuosity (of which I was soon convinced), I probably could have written syntactically better Greek than Mark did. You see, the Bibles we read in English are more or less cleaned up to make the contents more accessible. But the actual language is often pretty strange and even obscure; occasionally so strange that I wonder how honest it is to make it clearer in English. "Clunky" is about the best word to describe Mark's style. Imagine how I must have felt reading 5:25-27, in the story of the woman with the issue of blood, when I discovered this veritable wedding feast of participles:

And having existed in a flow of blood for 12 years and having suffered much by many doctors and having spent all of hers and in no way having benefited but having gotten all the worse, having heard about Jesus, having come into the crowd from behind, she touched his garments.

I assure you that whatever version you use, it doesn't sound like that. (Go ahead, look it up.) In part this is because nowadays the Bible is translated by committees, not inspired individuals like Luther or Tyndale. The idea is to render biblical language into something readable in the vernacular. It won't do to have Holy Writ in translationese. But the dispute comes whenever interpreters have to choose between literal faithfulness to the original and comprehensibility in the translation. At any rate, this indicates an occupational hazard of seminarians — we all want to do our own translation of the Bible, because none of the ones available are to our liking! All the more so once we discover what real Greek and not just elementary textbook Greek sounds like.

Anyway, by the time the class was over, my loyalty to Greek was wavering, and I still had another semester of Hebrew to go. And then the unthinkable happened. I'd been told at the beginning that another fundamental difference between Hebrew and Greek is that the former starts out hard and gets easier, while the latter starts out easy and gets hard. They were right. After about six months, I had a breakthrough in Hebrew. It began to make sense! And what's more, it was exciting. A certain level of primitiveness befits Hebrew much better than Greek, not least of all because of the kind of stories you find in the Old Testament. Hebrew is hard, fierce, forthright and bold. The intuition required to understand it serves to balance its essentially warrior spirit, the language of the Lord of Hosts. The OT lessons you've heard a hundred times spring amazingly to life, like Ezekiel's dry bones, when you're getting them out of the original. Nathan's "You are the man!" to David's betrayal of Uriah is ten times as forceful. The "hallelujahs" of Psalm 148 grow in meaning and power when you realize that the word really means "praise the LORD" - the "jah" on the end there is the closest Hebrew will ever get to saying the LORD's name outright. And let me tell you, I wonder how we can have the courage to disobey the commandments now that I know what they sound like in Hebrew.

The upshot of it all is that I'm in a dreadful pickle. Am I a Greek personality, or am I really a Hebrew personality after all? God only knows.