When I was a young student studying Christian ministries at Anderson University, I had studied French and Spanish and had done well. Since I was blind, I used recorded texts and took notes in braille. I enjoyed both languages; but what I really wanted to take was Hebrew. I assumed that it would not be possible—I didn’t think Hebrew could be written in braille.

In 2001, I learned that there was such a thing as Hebrew braille. I received a Hebrew braille Bible from someone who had graduated from a seminary and no longer wanted it. . It sat in my house, in boxes, for several years before I applied to seminary.

In 2006, I finally enrolled in my first seminary courses. I decided to wait a year before taking language courses so that I could arrange for whatever I needed. Arranging things proved to be more difficult than I expected.

Since AU had not had many students who were blind, I was accustomed to proposing accommodations or simply bringing whatever technology I needed into the classroom. When I began to talk about taking biblical languages, this strategy did not work smoothly. One of the first questions asked of me was whether an accessible course existed somewhere that I could take remotely. I answered that I did not know of such a course, and I went home and cried. I did not know how to put in words the reason that taking Hebrew at my own university was important to me. It had to do with community, and community was something that AU prized very highly as part of the learning process. At another university, that community would have to be built from the start between a professor and student who were both highly stressed and previously unacquainted.

I spent a great deal of time in prayer; and at the next seminary chapel service I wept openly as the prelude began with a song entitled, “He Knows My Name.” As people began to file into the chapel, someone greeted me from behind–an old family friend who was a retired professor. His wife was with him. I hugged them and said that I had been thinking of coming by to see them. She exclaimed, “I wish you would!” I wondered whether they were watching me cry and whether they wondered why I was crying. The interaction with them made me feel connected to the community of faith and somehow I felt that things would work out with regard to Hebrew.

Later that week, the dean sent me email outlining a plan for my Hebrew study. Since the text for the course was not available in a format that I could use, I would meet with an instructor one on one and work from an alternate text during the summer. I would be required to keep the same pace as the sighted students and complete the course by summer’s end.

I was unprepared for some of the things that I needed to do. I needed to find a way to make my computer display Hebrew in braille, and I needed to find a way to write in Hebrew on the computer. These involved extremely time-consuming solutions. I decided early on in the course that I should document everything so that others who needed similar solutions would not need to expend so much personal time and effort. Much later, when I took Greek, I needed to devise similar solutions. However, I saved some time since I had done it in Hebrew already and was not learning the technical process.

During my second year of Hebrew, I continued to meet privately with the professor for instruction. I did have direct access to the biblical text; by the end of the year, I had begun to gain facility with software-based research tools. Translating text was a deeply personal experience for me, and I often made discoveries that were life-changing. The more language I studied, the more hungry I became for text and linguistic understanding. At my hooding ceremony, I was surprised and deeply overwhelmed to hear the words, “professional distinction in Hebrew” appended when my name was called.

In addition to Hebrew, I also completed two years of Greek and served one semester as a teaching assistant in the first-year intensive Greek course. Following graduation, I continued to volunteer with first-year students for an additional three semesters as well as for a second intensive course. I have also assisted several people in configuring their computers so that they can access biblical language material.

It is my hope that everyone who is called to handle sacred text will take up the challenge of learning the languages. To that end, Lauren Tuchman and I will present a seminar as part of the academic teaching program unit at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature entitled “Using Technology to Meet the Needs of Biblical Language Scholars Who Are Blind.” Our hope is that in assisting professors in becoming more familiar with the fact that people who are blind can succeed as biblical scholars, we can help to eliminate some anxiety from the process of arranging for accommodations.