Laudator Temporis Acti

Roberta C. Bondi, Memories of God (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), pp. 65-67:

In college I was an English major. Now, recalling my childhood pleasure in Old Testament stories, I hit upon the idea of writing a graduate dissertation on the use of Old Testament imagery in the English metaphysical poets. In preparation for this work, one morning I decided to use the summer of 1963 before I began graduate work to learn some Hebrew at the seminary on campus. With a little effort that same morning I talked one of the professors into monitoring me, and that afternoon I bought a copy of Learning Hebrew by the Inductive Method and a Hebrew Bible.

The next morning I had my coffee, took my books out of their bag, and laid them on my desk under the window. I studied chapter 1 of the grammar carefully. After that, I had another cup of coffee, and I laid the Hebrew Bible in front of me, opening it, as you do all Hebrew Bibles, back to front. Then, as I stumbled through the first words of Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," I had an epiphany. Why this was so, I do not know, but I still recall the way the shape of the Hebrew letters and the look of the light falling on the creamy paper were mixed up with what I can only call a sense of cosmic goodness and joy in all created things I had never encountered before. It was as though the page itself were alive and the jots and tittles on the letters little flames. For the first time I could recall, life itself seemed all of a piece and trustworthy, and there was a place for me in it. In that instant I knew that God delighted in creation, in light, in water and mountains, in fruit-bearing trees and grasses, in water creatures and bugs, in wild animals and tame, in men and, most important for me, in women like me.

I decided at that very moment to leave off graduate work in English to do a graduate degree in Hebrew. Within the next few weeks, I applied to seminary for this purpose, and I was given a scholarship. I began second-year Hebrew that fall and I loved it. The next two years I took as many Old Testament and Hebrew courses as I could.

Id., p. 69:

Then I went off to Oxford in England to do graduate work in Semitic studies. I thought I had entirely made my escape from my old problems. Oxford, with its women's colleges, took it for granted that women could be scholars. The Oxford program suited me almost perfectly. We wrote Hebrew compositions, both prose and poetry. We studied Semitic philology. We read Hebrew texts and we read few secondary sources. On the other hand, we were not to raise questions about what the texts we studied might really be about.

"Could we take just a few minutes to talk about the meaning of the book of Job?" I asked the last week of a three-term course on the Hebrew text of that book. Embarrassed, the students looked at the table top and shuffled their feet. The Scottish professor drew himself up. "My dear madam," he replied, affronted, "that is something to ask your tutor in the privacy of your own tutorial!" It was at that moment, I believe, that I decided to leave the pain of the present by retreating forever into the romantic dust of the ancient world.

I can't find a book with the title Learning Hebrew by the Inductive Method. Could this be a reference to William Rainey Harper, Elements of Hebrew by an Inductive Method, often reprinted, e.g., 29th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906)?