21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Rare verb forms

Genesis 1:4

 

ד וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאוֹר כִּי־טוֹב וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ:

 

Translation:     Gd must have manifested the light for it was good, for Gd separated the light and the darkness.

 

Now, I have not been ignoring va-yavdel. I wanted to give you the regular-type material before I got to it. Yavdel is almost a hifil but not quite. I’ll show you.

 

Verb root class: STRONG, that is, none of the letters do any fancy tricks.

Binyan: almost hifil

Aspect: narrative imperfect

Person/gender/number: well, look at the subject and you tell me. Don’t peek at the table!!

 

hifil

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אַבְדִיל	נַבדִיל	First
תַּבְדִיל	תַּבְדִילוּ	Second/masculine
תַּבְדִילי	תַּבְדֵלְנָה	Second/feminine
יַבְדִיל	יַבְדִילוּ	Third/masculine
תַּבְדִיל	תַּבְדֵלְנָה	Third/feminine

 

The yod inside the verb is the classic sign of the hifil. This yod is all that distinguishes the progressive of hifil and piel when written without vowels.

 

The problem is, it’s missing from the verb in this verse. What’s more, you don’t see a dagesh in the middle root letter in the table, just in the verse. Here’s what the piel looks like:

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֲבַדֵּל	נְבַדֵּל	First
תְּבַדֵּל	תְּבַדְּלוּ	Second/masculine
תְּבַדְּלִי	תְּבַדֵּלְנָה	Second/feminine
יְבַדֵּל	יְבַדְּלוּ	Third/masculine
תְּבַדֵּל	תְּבַדֵּלְנָה	Third/feminine

 

In piel we have the dagesh in the dalet and the right vowel under it, but the first two vowels are wrong.

 

The answer is, I don’t know what binyan this is supposed to be. This and one other in the creation story are the only examples in Jewish scripture.

 

But that’s no reason to call it either hifil or piel.

 

And it’s also no reason to call this a scribal error or anomaly.

 

I’ve found plenty of forms in Torah and Tannakh that I couldn’t classify according to what we currently know about Biblical Hebrew.

 

When I think of an anomaly, I think of things that have a notation on them in a standard print copy of the Tannakh. Those notations were made by Jewish scholars between 500 and 1000 CE, that is, right after the Talmud was put into writing and nearly at the same time that the commentaries called Midrash were collected. The annotated version of Tannakh is called the Masoretic text. I discuss it on my Fact-Checking blog.

 

When I think of a scribal error, I think of the fragments in Cave 4 at Qumran, which seems to be storage for scrolls that weren’t kosher for study. I also wrote about those on the Fact-Checking blog.

 

YMMV. 

Now a little about the translator's bete noire.

 

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