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.
These two verses will take a lot of lessons to go over.
I am not giving the vocabulary here because I want to start teaching you about punctuation. The native form of punctuation developed its own notation, called trop. I’ll do more lessons on this later because in the legalistic parts of Torah, punctuation will help us figure out why Jewish law reads the way it does.
The first two punctuation marks to learn are the sof pasuq, that sort of colon at the end of verses, which is mostly equivalent to a period in English. There are a very few verses that don’t end in sof pasuq.
There is also a triangle pointing up, with an open bottom. It’s under chayah in verse 20 and ha-g’dolim in verse 21. In most cases it works like a semi-colon, which we use in English to separate the two parts of a compound sentence. Its name is etnach. Again, there are a very few verses that don’t have an etnach in them. In future verses, I will be asking you to find the etnach until I feel like you ought to be familiar with it.
If you want practice, go to this page on Mechon Mamre. Go over the first 19 verses in the right-hand column. You can email me with the list of words that had etnach under them and I’ll let you know how well you did. Ignore the left column; that is “Aramaic” (Neo-Babylonian) and doesn’t have trop.
This page shows two tables at the top. These are the 30 different trop markers for Torah but don’t choke up. I’ll teach you less than half of them by the time I’m done showing how they relate to Jewish law.
They also are used to indicate how to chant Torah. I’ll say more about that in a later lesson.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved
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