21st Century Bible Hebrew -- "hayah" idioms

Genesis 1:14

 

יד וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי מְאֹרֹת בִּרְקִיעַ הַשָּׁמַיִם לְהַבְדִּיל בֵּין הַיּוֹם וּבֵין הַלָּיְלָה וְהָיוּ לְאֹתֹת וּלְמוֹעֲדִים וּלְיָמִים וְשָׁנִים:

 

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim y’hi m’orot birqia ha-shamaim l’havdil beyn ha-yom u-veyn ha-laylah v’hayu l’otot ul’moadim ul’yamim v’shanim.

Translation:     Gd said let there be lights in the raqia of the heaven for separating between day and night; from now on they become signs and warnings and days and years.

 

I’ve talked about va-y’hi, based on the imperfect of hayah, as meaning something quite different from what translations say.

 

The same thing is true for v’hayu based on the perfect aspect, and all the forms like it in every person and number and gender.

 

This will become clearer in later verses where you will see it, but what it does is mark a point in time when something comes permanently into existence or usage. The translation for that is “from now on”.

 

In the last lesson, I translated this verse to bring out the fact that l’ has similar meaning every time this verse uses it.

 

The translation above brings out another feature of hayah l’ in every aspect – and even with the aspectless verb hyot. Hayah l’ means “become”. So if Torah has li-hyot l’, it means “for the purpose of becoming”.

 

It’s not clear to me why there is no l’ with the last word. I know from studying the rest of Torah that yamim with no number means “year”, not “days”; it’s a solar year, a specific number of days. When it has a number like “forty”, it’s more like “days”; there’s one place that has shnataim yamim, “exactly two years in days”.

 

It’s important that the heavenly bodies were not set up until now. The passage of time was known by alternation of light and dark, not by the heavenly bodies, for three days. The number three is a “magic number” in oral traditions, like in Grimm’s fairy tales. Axel Olrik wrote about the “magic number” principle as The Law of Three because that number is so prevalent, but he included under it numbers like seven or twelve.

 

Putting the creation of the heavenly bodies after the first set of three days de-emphasizes them. They are not gods. Gd did not need them to do His work. While the calendar can run from now on, it is more important to give light to, for example, the newly created plants.

 

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