Semitists in general are unasked for and Hebraists seem particularly unwanted.

I am told that unless one ‘diversifies’ professionally with theology, then there is not much I could do with Hebrew in this country. As if we are not all called to have our theology straight as Christians. Apparently I must become a professional Christian…

Well, the key word apparently is “my country (Sweden)” for I’m told I would stand greater chances elsewhere – that is in the truly English speaking world, or as the French would say, in the world ‘Anglo-Saxon’.

Why is that? In many other countries Hebrew is more than a grossly unnecessary, long dead language which happens to be the language of the largely irrelevant Old Testament.

In other countries Hebrew is a profoundly Christian language. Hebrew is considered even more Christian among the Semitic languages then even Syriac and Ge’ez.

This is because there is a Christian culture , scholarly and popular, of the Old Testament being foundational for the understanding of the only trinitarian God and for his promised Gospel (good news). The OT is not considered a loose and obscure prelude to the ‘real thing’.

This Christian culture does not feel the need to, at every cost,  approach the OT ‘scientifically’ by assuming, like secular scholarship, that Christ has nothing to do with the OT since OT is B.C. Rather, this culture acknowledges the Christ-centered nature of the Old Testament, and does not fail to see the marks of this in the Hebrew language.

Therefore Hebrew is important, relevant, interesting, exciting – you name it.

So, if God calls me for service in Sweden, there is some preparation of that ground that needs doing.

Attitudes need to change towards the OT and thus people’s grasp what the Bible is about, who God is and so on.

When this happens it will be a source of excitement for many in their Christian lives.

And they will want to learn some Hebrew…

But, how does one bring about these kind of long term attitudes in a nation? Any takers?

In all likelihood, goral originally referred to a bunch of small pebbles or similar objects used to make decisions by chance: they would be cast down on the ground or put in a vessel of some sort, from which one would be drawn at random. (A similar practice, in which stones were placed in a helmet, is clearly documented from Homeric Greece. The Greek verb for casting these objects was ballo, from which we get our English word “ballot.”)

For example, in Leviticus 16, Aaron takes “two goats,” “a goral for God” and a “goral for Azazel.” Then the goat that God’s goral lands on is God’s goat, and the goat that Azazel’s goral lands on is Azazel’s goat; this latter goat is sent “to Azazel” in atonement. (Based on an ancient misunderstanding of the Hebrew “to Azazel,” a 1530 translation reads “to scape” instead of “to Azazel,” giving us the English phrase “scapegoat.”)

Other examples include Nehemiah (10:35): “we have cast the gorals to see who shall bring the wood offering.” In Psalms (22:17), the Psalmist laments that “they divvy up my clothes, casting a goral for my garments.” In Numbers 26, God tells Moses to divide up the land by goral. Joshua, too, draws a goral and uses it to apportion the land among the Israelites.

Goral later progressed to mean not only the item which was cast, but also that to which the victor was due. (And because real-estate was so often allocated by goral, goral also meant “real-estate” in particular.) In the meantime, presumably on the assumption that destiny or fate had something to do with who won, goral began to mean “destiny,” as well.

The English word “lot” followed exactly the same path, meaning at first a small (usually wooden) object used to make random decisions (as in “draw lots”) and then both what one received (for example, a “lot of land”) and what one is destined to receive (as in one’s “lot in life.”)

Up to this point in the story, a Hebrew goral is exactly an English “lot.”

But the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls frequently mention goral, using it to mean “group of people” or “followers.”

In “The Rule of the Community,” a document (technically referred to as “1QS”) that describes all aspects of life in the Qumran sect, God has a goral and Belial (God’s Qumranic foe) has a goral. The priests bless those in God’s goral with a version of the priestly benediction, whereas the Levites curse those in Belial’s goral (1QS 2:2-5).

The War Scroll (“1QM”), which describes the final battle between the forces of good (“light”) and the forces of evil (“darkness”) before the “end of days,” begins with the prediction that the first attack by the sons of light will be against the goral of the sons of darkness.

If this usage of goral is akin to the English expression “to throw one’s lot in with,” God’s goral are the people who chose God, not the people that God chose.

As for pur, the word probably comes from Akkadian, which has a root pur that means “real-estate lot,” and a similar-sounding root meaning “vessel.” Perhaps Akkadian real-estate lots, too, were allocated by drawing lots. (Ibn Ezra thought the word might be Persian, but while Persian has a word pur, it means “son.”)

By curious chance, the word pur, if it were Hebrew, would have to have come from the Hebrew root p.r.r, which means “to break into crumbs.” And so in addition to reflecting our choice in God and our ancient good fortune, our early-spring holiday’s name indirectly reflects the hamentaschen we use to celebrate it.

Which in the case of Purim is just the way the cookie crumbles.

Happy Purim.

Gen. 2:18-19: And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

As much as we may hate it, sometimes, a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew grammar is important when studying Scripture

Gen. 1:25-26 says that God created animals before man, and yet Gen. 2:19 seems to say that God created men before animals. How are Christians to respond?

Very simply, that the phrase “God formed every beast” should be translated “God had formed every beast.” This, by the way, is precisely how modern translations such as the NIV and ESV render the passage. For those who want to know why this is the case, read on.

The Hebrew word for “God formed . . .” is wayyitser. To be technical, this is the Qal Imperfect of the verb yatsar. When the wa- is attached to the front of the word, the imperfect is reversed to a perfect, which means wayyitser is a Qal Perfect (for those who want to see this themselves, click here and check the tense of the word).

So if you don’t read Hebrew, what does all this mean? Rather than try to explain it myself, let me quote from the very easy to read and understand Basics of Biblical Hebrew:

The Perfect conjugation is used to express a completed action or a state of being. When used to describe a completed action (either in reality or in the mind of the speaker), the Hebrew Perfect may be translated by the English past tense (he studied), present perfect (he has studied), past perfect (he had studied), or future perfect (he will have studied). . . . It must be emphasized that the Hebrew Perfect does not have a tense (time of action) apart from context and issues of syntax. Rather, it primarily signifies aspect (type of action). The Perfect aspect designates a verbal action with its conclusion envisioned in the mind of the speaker or writer. To state it differently, the Perfect aspect denotes completed action, whether in the past, present, or future. (130, emphasis original)

The bottom line is that those who assert a contradiction here are simply ignorant of the most basic Hebrew grammar. They assume that the Hebrew words here have a particular tense when it is a well known fact that they do not. And, again, we don’t have to be scholars to recognize this. Simply by checking out other translations, those who cite this as a “contradiction” would quickly and easily see that it is absolutely nothing of the sort.

As an aside, I know reading about Hebrew grammar is the most exciting thing in the world. That’s probably why critics get this issue exactly wrong–they haven’t taken the time to read up on it either. This does, however, give us a pretty good tip to keep in mind when we study our Bibles: use multiple translations! We all have our favorite, but many translations treat each word a little differently. Studying those differences can often be  just as enlightening as studying the similarities. Beyond the Greek and Hebrew studies I do, I still rely mostly on the KJV and NASB, and I always check them against the NIV and ESV. And you don’t have to go to the store to pick up a copy of each of these. You can find them all, for free, at http://www.biblegateway.com.

This is not how we are to understand to hear when we read it in the Bible. Whereas translators in many instances take this into account for the obvious situations, it is helpful to keep this in mind when looking at the less obvious ones.

Both the Hebrew equivalent שמע (in the OT) and the Greek equivalent ακουω (in the NT) have a wider meaning which should be taken into account.

This post looks at the Hebrew and the Old Testament. A separate post will follow on the Greek and the New Testament.

Below are some examples of passages in the OT where שמר has the transparent meaning of ‘to obey‘. The instances are marked in bold.

1 Sam. 8:7:

⁷And the LORD said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.

Deut. 4:30:

³⁰When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to the LORD your God and obey his voice.

Josh. 1:18:

¹⁸Whoever rebels against your commandment and disobeys your words, whatever you command him, shall be put to death. Only be strong and courageous.”

Jer. 3:13:

¹³ Only acknowledge your guilt, that you rebelled against the LORD your God and scattered your favors among foreigners under every green tree, and that you have not obeyed my voice,

Judg. 2:20:

²⁰ So the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he said, “Because this people has transgressed my covenant that I commanded their fathers and have not obeyed my voice,

It is transparent that in these instances the more precise translation is ‘to obey‘ and not the simple ‘to hear’, just as the ESV has translated.

Here follows some passages where the ESV has translated ‘to listen’ or ‘to hear’ when in fact the implication of what is being said is ‘to obey’. The instances are again marked with bold:

Jer. 11:3:

³You shall say to them, Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Cursed be the man who does not hear the words of this covenant

Gen 3:17:

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

1 Kings 12:24:

²⁴‘Thus says the LORD, You shall not go up or fight against your relatives the people of Israel. Every man return to his home, for this thing is from me.’” So they listened to the word of the LORD and went home again, according to the word of the LORD.

Ex. 6:12

¹²But Moses said to the LORD, “Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me. How then shall Pharaoh listen to me, for I am of uncircumcised lips?”

There is a reoccurring sense in which listening means much more than just hearing, in our sense of the word – obeying is being implied. In Jer 11:3 it is understood that the one who does not obey is cursed, not the one who does not listen. This is confirmed in Gal 3: 10 when Paul quotes this verse:

¹⁰For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.”

Also in Gen 3:17, Adam committed no sin in listening to Eve, but is was by obeying her that he came to eat of the fruit and sin. In 1 Kings 12:24 they did not listen to the word of the LORD only to go out and fight but they obeyed the word of the LORD and did not go up to fight. The same is true for Ex. 6:12; surely the people had heard Moses, the issue was that they did not obey him.

There are of course many cases in which there is no deeper meaning to שמר than ‘to hear’ such as Gen 3:8:

⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

Other instances are more complex such as Deut. 6:4:

⁴“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

There is nothing to obey, only something to listen to. However, the passage continues with commands that are to be obeyed. (Deut. 6:6-9):

⁵You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. ⁶And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. ⁷ You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. ⁸ You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. ⁹ You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Thus the “Hear, O Israel…” encompasses both meanings in the imperative: Hear!, Obey!

Another meaning of שמר in Hebrew is ‘to give heed‘ or ‘to consent‘.

Gen 42:21:

²¹Then they said to one another, “In truth we are guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the distress of his soul, when he begged us and we did not listen. That is why this distress has come upon us.”

Judg. 11:17:

¹⁷ Israel then sent messengers to the king of Edom, saying, ‘Please let us pass through your land,’ but the king of Edom would not listen. And they sent also to the king of Moab, but he would not consent. So Israel remained at Kadesh.

Lev. 26:14:

¹⁴ “But if you will not listen to me and will not do all these commandments,

Job 15:17:

¹⁷“I will show you; hear me, and what I have seen I will declare

As we see the line between consent/give heed and obey is fine. For example, it could be argued that Lev. 26:14 is about obedience if it is seen as a mere prelude to “do all these commandments…”.

What is clear however is that except for instances with the plain meaning of hearing a sound, all other uses of שמר that we have seen has that in common that a response (or lack is) is implied with the word.

When you hear you either obey or disobey, give heed or ignore.

The Bible, within which we’ve been looking at this word, teaches us that it is so with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Once heard it does not leave anyone neutral – it demands a response.

And we are all either saved or condemned on the basis of what that response is.

Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Saviour?

HT: Boulders 2 Bits

Still working on he and vav and I came across this pair of words in Ruth vatishtachu artza.

Two questions — why the vav at the end of the first word? And why the he at the end of the second? KJV translates it as if it were hithpael — she bowed herself to the ground.

I’m playing catch-up after a wonderful visit to Israel, so I thought I’d start with a grammar question. (After all, nothing says “fun” like a little morphology.)

The first word is a wonderful combination of all sorts of grammatical processes. It’s the apocopated hitpa’el, future feminine third person singular. The root is Sh.Ch.H, and the shin and the tav metathesize (“switch places”) as expected with sibilants in hitpa’el.

By apocopated (“short”) I mean that the the final heh from the root Sh.Ch.H has dropped off, as final hehs frequently do in the future third-person singular. (Another example is vayavk instead of vayivkeh for “he wept.”)

So we would expect the form to be vatishtachv instead of vatishtachaveh. The extra vowel in the longer form under the chet — the “a” after the “ch” in transliteration — comes to prevent the frequently undesirable condition of a syllable ending with a chet. In the shorter form, however, another stratagy prevents a chet-final syllable. The consonantal vav becomes vocalic. This, too, is a regular part of Hebrew grammar — consider the prefix “and” which can be v’- or u- (among other possibilities) — but grammar books don’t often emphasize the general nature of this process.

So the first word is just “she bowed.” (Perhaps “bowed herself” was English when the KJV was composed, but now that translation is just wrong.)

As for artza, the final heh is directional. The word means “toward the ground.”

So we have metathesis, apocopation, and resyllabification in the first word. And — perhaps refusing to disappear completely — the missing heh from the first word shows up on the second.

I have a question about the gender of nations. It seems like nations can be referred with both masculine and feminine pronouns. Is there any significance with this change? For example, Moab is “he” in Isa 16:12, Israel is “he” in Jer 2:14; 50:17 but “herself” in Jer 3:11, and Babylon is “she” in Jer 50:29, just to name a few.

What a fascinating observation for those of us who love language.

Gender, as we know, is more complex than Language 101 classes would suggest (I have some particularly vexing examples here), and it’s not unheard of for words to allow two genders.

For example, the Modern Hebrew shemesh, “sun,” is generally feminine but in poetry can be masculine. In this case, the agreement choice even has implications for the translator, because masculine agreement is a sign of poetic register.

On the other hand, multiple gender agreement is fairly rare. So when we see dual agreement with so many nation-words (“Moab,” “Damascus,” “Egypt,” “Israel,” and others) we have to assume that this is more than coincidence.

To get a sense of the issue we need only look at Isaiah 17:1. There, damesek (“Damascus”) is first masculine, then feminine: hinei damesek musar [masculine] mei’ir v’hayta [feminine] m’i hapala, that is, “Damascus will cease to be a city and will become a pile of rubble.” “Will cease” is masculine and “will become” is feminine.

Another example is mitzrayim (“Egypt”). In Exodus 12:33 the word for the nation takes a feminine verb, in Psalm 105:38 (sometimes numbered 104:38), a masculine one.

Exodus 14:25 expands the data set a bit, because Egypt is personified as “I,” not “we”: vayomer mitzrayim anusa…, “Egypt said, ‘I will….’,” though every translation I know of, including the LXX, renders this as “we will…” Going back to Exodus 12:33, we see that even though mitzrayim takes a feminine singular verb at first, the continuation of the verse is masculine plural.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an easy way to gather all of the verbs that have a particular subject. So for now this is more like a “Q and not really A,” because I don’t have an answer yet.

(As a guess, this is a case of conflicting agreement considerations. For example, in English, “either he or I will be in jail” is perfectly grammatical. But it’s not so easy to put that sentence into the present. “Either he or I am in jail?” No. “Either he or I is in jail?” Also no. “Either he or I are in jail?” A little better. I suspect that, similarly, in Hebrew there were reasons for nations to be masculine and feminine, singular and plural. But without more data, it’s hard to form a more concrete conclusion.)

Can someone provide a complete or nearly complete set of the verbs for, let’s say, “Israel,” “Moab,” “Egypt” and “Damascus”?

The NET Bible does not render imperatives in Psalm 97:7, while others do. Their footnote is helpful, but not enough for me to opine on which is right. What light can you shed on this?

The phrase here is hishtachavu lo kol elohim. The last three words mean, “to-him all gods.” As chance would have it, though, the verb that starts the phrase could be either an imperative plural or a third personal past plural form. (Except for 2nd person masculine singular future and 3rd person feminine singular future, this doesn’t happen a lot in Hebrew. Usually the role of a Hebrew verb is clear from its form.) For example, in Psalm 96:9, the word hishtachavu is imperative; in Jeremiah 8:2, 3rd-person past.

Furthermore, the word order is ambiguous because — unlike English — the post-verbal phrase in Hebrew can be a subject of any sort.

Finally, even context doesn’t help here.

So the Hebrew means either “all the gods bowed down to [God]” or “all you gods, bow down to [God].”

We do get a clue from the LXX — which translates hishtachavu as an imperative here — but the LXX is generally very unreliable when it comes to disambiguating Hebrew.

So in Psalm 97:7 we have that rare instance of a truly ambiguous text.

The Examples

The Infix Nun

From time to time, a nun will appear between a verb and its pronominal objective ending. For example, in Psalm 72:15, we find y’varachenhu. Breaking down the verb form, we find the prefix y’- representing third-person singular future; the verb varach, “bless”; and the suffix -hu for “him.” So far, the verb means “he will bless him.” But there’s also an added -en- in the middle. That’s the infixed nun, commonly called the “nun emphatic.”

Because nuns are frequently replaced by a dagesh in Biblical Hebrew, it is more common to find the “nun emphatic” represented by nothing more than a dagesh. Probably the best known example is in the Priestly Benediction from Numbers 6:24-26. The last verb of Numbers 6:25 is vichuneka, with a dagesh in the final kaf representing the “nun empahtic” that dropped out.

But there is no evidence anywhere to suggest that this nun has emphatic force.

The Infinitive Absolute

A much more common Hebrew construction is the “infinitive absolute” in conjunction with a conjugated verb form. For example, in Genesis 2:17 we find mot tamut, which the KJV notes in a footnote is literally “dying thou shalt die.” Based on the (wrong) assumption that this doubling of verb forms is emphatic, the KJV translates “thou shalt surely die” here. (As it happens, this Hebraism is preserved in the LXX thanatu apothaneisthe, “by death die.”)

But not only is there no evidence that this construction is emphatic, there is evidence that it is not. In Genesis 3:4 the snake tries to convince the women to eat from the forbidden tree; he (it?) reassures her that lo mot t’mutun. Obviously this doesn’t mean “you will not surely die.” It just means “you will not die.”

The Lengthened Imperative

Frequently a verb form will have two imperatives: a shorter one, essentially the future without the prefix, and a longer one with an additional heh at the end. For example, from titen (“you will give”) we have both ten in Genesis 14:21 and t’nah in Genesis 30:26. Some grammars, such a Gesenius (wrongly, in my opinion), suggest that the latter is “give!” Again, there’s no evidence for an emphatic reading in these verb forms. (The forms are also not limited to the imperative, as we see in the continuation of Genesis 30:26, with elecha for elech.)

The Greek Emphatic Pronouns

The forth example comes from Greek, which has two sets of 1st- and 2nd-person pronouns. For example, “my” is either mou or emou. The latter form is called “emphatic” because it is widely assumed to convey particular emphasis. Once again, though, there is nothing to suggest that the longer forms are necessarily more emphatic than the shorter ones. (Bill Mounce has a post — also available here — where he similarly notes that sometimes the “emphatic forms [...] are significant, but when they are objects of prepositions, evidently not.” In other words, he notes a case where the “emphatic” forms are not emphatic.)

Summary

What all four of these cases have in common is that the supposedly emphatic forms are longer than the ordinary ones. I think there has been a general if misguided assumption that longer words are more emphatic that shorter ones. At one level, it seems reasonable. And there are even times when it’s true (I give some examples here). But it’s not a general principal.

I think we have to rethink all of these “emphatic” forms with an eye toward figuring out what they really represent.

Is Genesis 4:7, the first words, halo im-teitiv s’eit, an example of the idiom of a condition with antecedent but no stated consequence? Would the last of the words apply to Cain (as KJV implies) or to Cain’s offering (JPS)?

Genesis 4:7 is clearly poetry, so we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s a little difficult to understand.

The first word, halo, generally introduces a question, but in this case it’s a rhetorical question, perhaps used as an exclamation.

The second and third words, connected by a hyphen, mean “if you do well.” The words are addressed to Cain. These present the condition.

The fourth word means “rise.” It’s the consequence of “if you do well,” and the grammatical form is tenseless and devoid of agreement. (For those who care: it’s an infinitive absolute. The word comes from the root nun.sin.aleph. In the infinitive the nun drops out, and a final tav is appended: laseit. The infinitive absolute consists of the infinitive without the initial l- ["to"], which is how we get s’eit.)

To make sense of s’eit here, we we have to look back to Genesis 4:5–6, where the opposite verb nafal is used idiomatically. In Genesis 4:5, Cain’s “face fell” (nafal) — he was upset or angry — and in the next verse God asks Cain why his “face fell” (again nafal). God’s lesson is that that, if Cain does well, he will (have a face that doesn’t fall but rather that will) rise; and if he doesn’t do well (the continuation of Genesis 4:7), “sin will couch at the door.”

What’s going on with the pronominal suffixes in Psalm 103 3-8? I can’t find -ki as a pronominal suffix in any of my grammar books — neither singular nor plural!

Good question.

The suffix -ki (also spelled -chi) is a variant form of -k, and it means “your (sng, f).” We see it in Psalm 103, as you note, and also, e.g., in Psalm 116:19 (b’tocheichi, “within you [Jerusalem]“).

It may have been formed by analogy with the feminine singular future tense, or may be part of a broader pattern in which matres lectionis get added to words for reasons we no longer know (poetic affect, maybe). Other examples include the final heh that is added to some verbs, and, perhaps, the alternation between al and alei.

For more than 1,000 years, when Hebrew speakers looked at the sky, they saw five planets — Hama (Mercury), Noga (Venus), Maadim (Mars), Tsedek (Jupiter) and Shabtai (Saturn). The five planets closest to earth all have ancient Hebrew names, some of them dating back to the time of the Talmud.

On the other hand, the two planets that are further away — Uranus and Neptune — were not known in ancient times, and are therefore referred to by these names in Hebrew, too. Now the Hebrew Language Academy is inviting the public to help choose Hebrew names for the solar system’s farthest flung planets.

Read more….

Second, I would be prepared at how Hebrew does not “behave itself,” i.e., how grammars necessarily abstract the language almost to the point where a fair amount of what you’ve been learning doesn’t correspond to the actual biblical text.

More than once I have encountered this sort of surprise at the biblical text. So I’m curious, what sorts of quirks of Hebrew grammar have people encountered that seem to run contrary to what they learned about Hebrew?

Numbers pop up in the most amazing places. Today we’ll look at a few. And we’ll start with one of the Hebrew words for “few,” because almost paradoxically it’s the plural of the word for “one.” One way to say “a few words” is milim ahadot, literally, “words ones.” While in the singular, “one” means “one,” in the plural it means “some.” Leave it to Hebrew to have a plural for “one.”

Read more….

What do apples, oranges and tomatoes have in common in Hebrew, as opposed to mangoes, bananas and carrots? Let’s find out. (Here’s a hint that won’t surprise you: The difference between the two groups has nothing to do with the foods themselves; it’s a matter of grammar.)

To get started, we look at a construction called smichut in Hebrew – literally, “closeness” – translated as “the construct” in English (creating the unfortunately alliterative phrase “construct construction”).

Read more….

It is not unusual to hear Israelis yelling “die!” at each other. That’s because, in Hebrew, dai literally means “enough,” and it’s a common way of telling someone “that’s enough already; now please quit it.” (Two American parents took their children to Israel for the year. One day the five-year-old daughter came home from her new Israeli school and reported that she’d learned a Hebrew word: dai. She reported “it means ‘stop fighting.’”)….

Read more….