Genesis 1:15
טו וְהָיוּ לִמְאוֹרֹת בִּרְקִיעַ הַשָּׁמַיִם לְהָאִיר
עַל־הָאָרֶץ וַיְהִי־כֵן:
Transliteration: V’hayu l’m’orot birqia hashamaim l’hair al-ha-arets
va-y’hi khen.
Translation: They shall be for
lights in the raqia of the heaven to shed light on the earth and it was
so.
Letters in this lesson:
Vocabulary in this lesson:
לְהָאִיר
|
to shed light
|
This word is an infinitive in
Hebrew. All infinitives have “l” in
front of them.
This infinitive is the causative binyan. How do I know? Two clues.
One is the heh at the
start. This letter is in the infinitive
of this binyan, and also in other forms of the verb in that binyan.
The second sign is the yod in
the middle. That’s the real clue.
You’ve seen other forms of this same
root. M’orot is one of them, and
you notice that it has a vav before the resh, not a yod. M’orot is a noun. In verse 3, lesson 10, you saw or which
has all three root letters, aleph vav resh. That’s also a noun.
What’s the difference between m’orot
and or? You might say that or
is the qal form and m’orot is a causative form. The mem at the start of m’orot is
another sign of the causative binyan, in the present tense. The difference is that in this verse, the m’orot
shed light but in verse 3, the light simply existed.
Here is the present tense of le-hair.
Singular
|
Plural
|
Gender
|
מֵאִיר
|
מְאִירִים
|
Masculine
|
מְאִירָה
|
מְאִירוֹת
|
Feminine
|
Notice
that the masculine singular is pronounced meir, and it is two
syllables not one.
It
is also a personal name. Golda Meir was
the first woman prime minister of Israel.
Rabbi Meir was a famous scholar 2000 years ago; all anonymous rulings in
the Mishnah are credited to him. On the
other hand, all the rulings credited in his name, instead of anonymously, seem
to have gone against him. His name is
only recorded in those incidents so that if somebody argues the same way he
did, it could be pointed out that the argument has already been decided in the
opposite way.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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