21st Century Bible Hebrew -- infinitives and beyond

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 are for the purpose of signs and warnings and days and years.

Letters in this lesson:

Vocabulary in this lesson:

מְאֹרֹת	lights
אֹתֹת	signs
מוֹעֲדִים	warnings
שָׁנִים	years

Here we go again rejecting more western terminology that has been foisted onto Biblical Hebrew and interferes with understanding what is really going on.

The bolded words in the translation correspond to l’havdil. Hebrew teachers tell you this is an infinitive. That’s not true and teaching you otherwise now will help you avoid misunderstanding grammar in the Bible that has confused the classics scholars who applied a term from Latin to Hebrew.

Just as Semitic languages have agentless structures, they have aspect-less structures. There is meaning in Torah that none of the three aspects will suit. This is one of them, but there are more extreme examples all over Torah; two special ones are in Exodus and another in Deuteronomy.

Why won’t perfect aspect work here? Because the separation is not one and done.

Why won’t imperfect aspect work? Because that’s for an action and here we need a status.

Why won’t progressive work? It comes close, but we would want vihi as in a previous verse.

Why not use vihi?  We already had the deontic y’hi, the lights now exist, and we are now explaining what they are for.

L’ doesn’t just mean “to”, it also means “for the purpose of”. Progressive aspect is not used with with prepositions and we need something that will work with l. The only thing that works in such a situation is an aspectless verb.

The aspectless verb is gerundive, as the translation shows. As a result, it can be used adjectivally or substantively. There are important places in Torah, one in Exodus, where this substantive usage is required to fit the grammar that brings out the meaning of the situation.

Arabic has aspect-less structures, and because of their function, they too got slapped with the term infinitive – by westerners. Arab grammarians have a different name that is less confusing.

Western scholars have also slapped the name “infinitive” on one use of the Assyrian perfect aspect. If they would think in terms of what it is doing, and not what to call it, they would probably find that it is behaving substantively. The fact that they have also used “participle” in the same context supports what I’m saying, because participles can have substantive force, being closely related to the progressive aspect.  Assyriologists have a lot of re-thinking to do, because Assyrian was a direct descendant of Akkadian, and Arabic grammar has a lot more in common with Akkadian than Hebrew grammar does.  Since “infinitive” is a bad label for the Arabic structure, it’s probably a bad label for the structure in Assyrian.

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