I taught the wrong preposition

If I had it to do over again, I would not teach לְיַד as the basic preposition 'next to, beside' in AwB lesson 6. Here's why:

לְיַד occurs only 6 times in the text with a prepositional function. Of these 6, only 3 refer to a physical spatial location (1 Sam.19:3, Ps.140:6, Prov.8:3), while the other 3 refer to serving "alongside" someone in the context of assisting someone with duties (1 Chron.18:17, 23:28, Neh.11:24). From this tiny number of occurrences, it's clear that this word won't be very helpful for students who want to read the biblical text. (Moreover, the meaning of it is pretty easy to understand in context once a student is familiar with the word יָד. My use of לְיַד may have been due to unconscious influence from Modern Hebrew.)

If I could do it over, I would instead teach the word אֵ֫צֶל, which also means 'beside,' and occurs over 65 times in the text. It's still not a very common word, but students will see it much more often in the text than they will see לְיַד. 

אֵצֶל הַפָּרוֹת - 'beside the cows' (Gen. 41:3)

אֵצֶל הַמִּזְבֵּחַ - 'beside the altar' (Lev. 1:16)

It takes suffixes as well: 

אֶצְלִי - 'beside me' (Gen. 39:15)

אֶצְלוֹ - 'beside him' (Neh. 2:6)

אֶצְלָהּ - 'beside her' (Gen 39:16)

אֶצְלָם - 'beside them' (Ez. 1:19)

The moral of the story: look up words carefully in the text before teaching them and really find out how they're used and how often. Don't just assume based on what sounds right like I did! 😅