21st Century Bible Hebrew -- pronoun suffixes

Genesis 1:20-21

כ וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ הַמַּ֔יִם שֶׁ֖רֶץ נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה וְעוֹף֙ יְעוֹפֵ֣ף עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ עַל־פְּנֵ֖י רְקִ֥יעַ הַשָּׁמָֽיִם:

כא וַיִּבְרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֔ים אֶת־הַתַּנִּינִ֖ם הַגְּדֹלִ֑ים וְאֵ֣ת כָּל־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַֽחַיָּ֣ה ׀ הָֽרֹמֶ֡שֶׂת אֲשֶׁר֩ שָֽׁרְצ֨וּ הַמַּ֜יִם לְמִֽינֵהֶ֗ם וְאֵ֨ת כָּל־ע֤וֹף כָּנָף֙ לְמִינֵ֔הוּ וַיַּ֥רְא אֱלֹהִ֖ים כִּי־טֽוֹב:

Translation: Gd said the waters will swarm with swarming things, soul of life; and fliers will fly over the earth against the raqia of heaven.

Gd created the large taninim; and all souls of life that creep that swarm the waters for their kinds, and all the fliers of wing for its kind, Gd manifested its goodness.

The following words are examples of pronominal suffixes:  לְמִינֵהוּ; לְמִינֵהֶם; לְמִינָהּ.

You will also see לְמִינוֹ sometimes.

Two of these words mean the same thing: “according to his kind”. I don’t know what the difference is. There are only about 30 examples of these words in the whole Jewish Bible.

If you look back at the direct object pronoun, you will see that the endings are the same. What is different is the body. You’ll see more of the same when I get to other pronouns.

The body is a noun.  Any noun -- actually any substantive -- can be turned into a substantive phrase with a preposition prefix and an optional pronoun suffix.  I'll show what I mean by "substantive" when we come across one.

It's important because there’s another word that looks like it.  Here, min means “kind, sort, class, group”.  The other min means “from”. It’s related to mi, which will come up in chapter 2, but as far as I remember, min only means “from”. 

So  just like in English, there are words that look alike but mean different things, even when you have the vowels. And of course just like with English, if you leave the vowels out, it’s harder to guess what the word is unless you have other information.

Like context. There’s a scene in War and Peace where Levin uses an old parlor game to propose to Kitty. He writes words with chalk (in Russian of course) on a card table with a baize cover. Because of the context of their conversation, Kitty guesses every word.

There’s no such thing as a street language where every word can mean what you want it to mean. Languages form as ways of communicating between people, and if every individual person has their own meaning for every word, communication breaks down.

I have known people who thought that Hebrew, and Biblical Hebrew in particular, was different, and I’ve read books by other such people. Don’t believe the hype. It’s the opposite argument from saying each and every word means only one thing in every context, and both are false.

And that’s why languages can be so hard to use and so hard to learn. 

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