21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:22-23, segolate verbs

Genesis 1:22-23

כב וַיְבָ֧רֶךְ אֹתָ֛ם אֱלֹהִ֖ים לֵאמֹ֑ר פְּר֣וּ וּרְב֗וּ וּמִלְא֤וּ אֶת־הַמַּ֨יִם֙ בַּיַּמִּ֔ים וְהָע֖וֹף יִ֥רֶב בָּאָֽרֶץ:

כג וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם חֲמִישִֽׁי:

Gd blessed them saying: fruit and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, flyer multiply on earth.

There was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

Vocabulary in this lesson:

חֲמִישִׁי	Fifth
וַיְבָרֶךְ	Blessed, narrative past
פְּרוּ	Fruit, imperative plural
וּרְבוּ	Multiply, imperative plural
וּמִלְאוּ	Fill, imperative plural
יִרֶב	Multiply, *

I have a star on yirev because one of my sources says it’s from ravah, a lamed heh verb, and that ought to mean this is a certainty epistemic. However, the syntax is all wrong. If it was a certainty epistemic, it would sign and seal that foregoing information was true. That’s not what we have here. This clause is about an entirely new subject, the multiplication of birds.

Another possibility is a polel verb, ravav, which has a similar meaning. A different resource I have says that this verb is only used in hifil and hufal. Now one thing that suggests hifil is correct, is that polel verbs have a habit of dropping the repeated letter in hifil (also in nifal). But the vowels are wrong. Instead of a segol, we should have a patach if this was hifil.

This goes back to something you should have noticed in the lesson on vayomer. I gave a conjugation for amar, but it didn’t look like vayomer which uses a segol; the conjugation had patach in the imperfect.  Yirev also has the yod prefix of the imperfect.

Both vayomer and yirev are examples of what seems to be a class of verbs which replace a patach or a tseire with segol.  They seem to occur with statements or actions which are crucial to keeping the story going as opposed to narrative past which simply signals that we are still inside the story. Most of them are “imperfect”, like this, but I’ve seen an example of what looks like it’s perfect aspect. Most are “qal”, like vayomer, but polel verbs don’t drop that consonant in qal, so here yirev is a “hifil” version. I’ve also seen a version that looks like it’s related to piel.

While vayomer is usually positioned like an evidentiary epistemic, the same is not true for other examples of these segolate verbs, which I have taken to calling NARRATIVE NECESSITY in contrast to narrative past.

So the real meaning of that last clause in verse 23 is more like “but birds are going to multiply on earth.” What’s the narrative necessity? Well, it’s sort of a mutual necessity. Everybody knows birds nest on the land. It will turn out that the only creatures Noach takes into the ark live on land – not fish or cetaceans. So he has to take birds into the ark.  But it's not just so that they will survive; he needs to have the crow and dove at hand for the denouement of that story.

Vav as meaning “but” at the start of a clause, followed by an imperfect, is something we’ll see again in 10 or 12 verses.

I told you this series of lessons was going to turn your head around. If you know of a paper on Biblical Hebrew that examines this segolate morphology as anything but anomalous forms of the “normal” morphology, I would love to know about it, because that would show me that I’m not the lone stranger realizing that these are not anomalies but a different and relatively regular morphology.

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