21st Century Bible Hebrew -- noun/verb relationships

Genesis 1:11

 

יא וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים תַּדְשֵׁא הָאָרֶץ דֶּשֶׁא עֵשֶׂב מַזְרִיעַ זֶרַע עֵץ פְּרִי עֹשֶׂה פְּרִי לְמִינוֹ אֲשֶׁר זַרְעוֹ־בוֹ עַל־הָאָרֶץ וַיְהִי־כֵן:

 

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim tadshe ha-arets deshe esev mazria zera ets p’ri oseh p’ri l’mino asher zaro-vo al-ha-arets va-y’hi khen.

Translation:     Gd said let the land sprout sprouts, plants having seed, fruit tree making fruit of its kind that its seed is in it on the earth; it must have been so.

Letters in this lesson: ז

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

 

תַּדְשֵׁא	sprout (v)
דֶּשֶׁא	sprout (n)
עֵשֶׂב	grass, plant, herb
מַזְרִיעַ	making seed
זֶרַע	seed (n)
עֵץ	tree
פְּרִי	fruit
מִין	kind, sort, type

 

Remember that I said I was going to watch for another example like va-yavdel?  Well, we have it here.  Tadshe has the same vowels in the same places.  What it does not have is a dagesh in the  shin in the middle.

 

Also notice the relationship between two pairs of words in this vocabulary: tadshe, deshe; mazria, zera.

 

In English, we do all kinds of things to nouns to get verbs and vice versa. Television becomes televize, compute becomes computer, telephone can be either noun or verb, etc.

 

In Hebrew the root letters of the verb are always in the noun, and then some of the same prefixes and infixes will be used as in the verbal binyanim, to get the necessary sense. If you remember mavdil, you can see that mazria is from the same binyan,  but zera doesn’t look anything like the verbs we have already seen.

 

That said, we have esev here, which is green plants, and it makes a good example of what happens to a noun when the first letter is a guttural: alef, heh, chet, or ayin.

 

Which should make you think back to the conjugation of aseh and rachaf. So here is a chart for esev which is masculine, and for a feminine noun that starts with a guttural.
 

indefinite	construct	Person/gender
עֵשֶׂב	עֵשֶׂב	Masculine singular
עֲשָׂבִים	עִשְׂבֵי	Masculine plural
הֲלָכָה	הֲלָכַת	Feminine singular
הֲלָכוֹת	הִלְכוֹת	Feminine plural

 

Notice the “i" in the construct plural.

 

Halakhah means Jewish law and, as you might have guessed, it has the same root as halakh, “walk”.

 

Esev, on the other hand, has no known verbal counterpart that I know of. Harkavy’s dictionary says the verb would mean being bright green, but he has no examples in Tannakh of its use. Neither are there any examples in Mishnah, or in Jastrow’s Talmudic dictionary. So Harkavy has an entry based on the relationship between verbs and nouns in Hebrew but it’s never used.

New verse, new verb form next.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved