JCBT November 2024 Newsletter

Shalom to you all. I have several items of good news to share with you all.
JCBT Programs

Semester Program Approval: In mid-October we were copied on an email from Prof. Adina Moshavi, Chair, Dept. of Hebrew Language of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI), to Sheli Amir, Director, Division of Summer Courses and Special Programs of the Rothberg International School of HUJI, confirming her approval of our Semester program for accreditation by the Hebrew University. This is wonderful news! Hebrew University is one of the premier universities in the world, and our relationship with HUJI is strong and rests on nearly 30 years of good relationships with the various officials there through those years. Our Founders, Halvor and Mirja Ronning laid a solid foundation on which HBT/JCBT has been built. And now Reinier de Blois, as Academic Director, Or Nakirekanti, as Director of Operations, and I are continuing to foster these good relationships. Praise the Lord. We are grateful.
French Leviticus course September 15 – October 5, 2024
Praise the Lord that eight French-speaking translation personnel from three countries in Africa were able to come and benefit from our three-week course on Leviticus taught by long-time friend, teacher and Executive Committee member Dr. Samy Tioye along with Dr. Judy Heath from SIL. Judy’s husband Jeff was also involved in training the students in special translation software. They were able to go on several field trips led by Ronit Maoz. I also met with Samy and Judy to discuss ideas for increasing our French-speaking programs. Please pray for wisdom, good ideas, good candidates, and adequate funding.
The students’ departing flights were cancelled due to the War, so they had to stay longer than we and they had planned. We’re thankful that they were finally able to return home. Here is a photo of our dear Finnish volunteers helping the students get ready to cook for themselves for a few days. Click on the picture below to watch a short, fun video from that day!
English Proverbs course November 25 – December 13, 2024
Very soon our Proverbs course taught by long-time friend, teacher and Board member Murray Salisbury will begin. We have planned for this to be our first fully hybrid course. At this time, we have six students registered to come to JCBT to study on-site, and 9-11 students either registered or considering registering for the online course, with the potential of more. We are so grateful to the Lord and for Murray’s flexibility and commitment because this course was originally planned for Nov-Dec 2023, but was postponed because of the then-recently begun War with Hamas in Gaza. May God allow all six to come and for all the students to benefit from Murray’s teaching and their learning together.Semester 2025
We have 10 students registered for our Semester course. Our partners, Hebrew for the Nations (H4N), have begun our online Living Biblical Hebrew Level 1 course which will continue through the end of January 2025. This will be followed by the intensive three-week H4N Level 2 course in March 2025 at JCBT. We hope that these two foundational courses will better prepare our students for the high intermediate level required for our technical courses. This year we will have Itai Kagan, PhD Candidate at HUJI to teach Textual Criticism, Dr. Reinier de Blois to teach Semantics, Dr. Lénart de Regt to teach Discourse Analysis, Dr. Ernst Wendland to teach Poetry, and I will lead the Historical Geography of the Land of the Bible course. We are excited to once again hold our semester course in 2025, our 30th year! Praise the Lord!!!
Semester 2023
August 2025 BHCT course
Fourteen students have begun the Year 1 course that leads to the four-week course in August. This is part of the Biblical Hebrew for Consultant Training (BHCT) program that was started back in 2016 when several NT-experienced consultants expressed the need for special training they could undergo while still working full-time. So Year 1 is Living Biblical Hebrew once a week online from September-July. Then we bring them to Israel for the very intensive four-week course. Then Year 2 is again once a week online from October – June and focuses on the technical aspects of Biblical Hebrew. This is our 9th cohort, and we already have five signed up for Cohort 10 that will start in September 2025. I really love this program because it continues strong due to the cooperation of JCBT, Jerusalem Seminary/Hebrew for the Nations, Seed Company, and SIL to provide teachers, logistics, and funding. What amazing things God can do when we work together!A note on security: We continue to monitor the situation as best we can to make the wisest decisions we can, and our bomb shelters are well stocked. The October students had to spend about an hour inside the shelter. I asked about them and I was told they spent the entire hour singing praises to God. Please pray that the War would stop and the hostages would be returned.I’ll close this good news update with one more thought. We have good numbers of students for all of our programs, and we are grateful to the Lord for leading them to us. May He continue to do so!

Thanksgiving
In the US, we celebrate an annual holiday we call Thanksgiving. This year we’ll celebrate on November 28th. There is a long history and there are many traditions surrounding this day. In my family, every year we had a large reunion, sometimes with more than 100 family members. It was always a wonderful time.
But underneath the history and the tradition is the fact that all good things come from our Heavenly Father who loves us and cares for us. He provides for us in so many ways. We at JCBT are thankful to God for saving us and sustaining us, for the legacy that He gave to us through the vision He gave to our Founders Halvor and Mirja Ronning and the decades of service they dedicated to Him, and for the team we have now to lead JCBT. We are thankful for the more than 200 students we’ve had in our Semester Programs and the many hundreds more in our One-Book-at-a-Time courses, Land of the Bible Courses, and our Biblical Hebrew for Consultant Training programs. We are especially thankful for them because they take what they’ve learned with us and train hundreds, even thousands of others involved in Bible translation throughout the world.

In Him,

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