21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Vayomer ESSENTIAL

Genesis 1:3

ג וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי־אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר:

 

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim y’hi or va-y’hi or.

Translation:     Gd said Let light exist and light existed.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson: 

יֹּאמֶר	he said
יְהִי	Let X exist
אוֹר	light

 

So let’s classify this bad boy.

 

Va-yomer is a peh alef verb and you know that alef is one of the four guttural letters, right?

 

It’s in the qal binyan.

 

As I said, it’s narrative imperfect.

 

It’s 3^rd masculine singular.

 

You will see this verb scores if not hundreds of times in Torah so memorize the table and save yourself some lookup time.

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אוֹמַר	נֹאמַר	First
תֹּאמַר	תֹּאמְרוּ	Second/masculine
תֹּאמְרִי	תֹּאמַרְנָה	Second/feminine
יֹאמַר	יֹאמְרוּ	Third/masculine
תֹּאמְרִי	תֹּאמַרְנָה	Third/feminine

 

In case you were wondering why there’s a dagesh in those tavs, it’s almost beyond the scope of this course.  If you catch an imperfect 2^nd or a 3^rd feminine  without dagesh, email me and we’ll look at it.

 

Now. The other thing you should be asking is why I didn’t put the vav in the conjugation table. That’s because this same form is the plain imperfect aspect, and without vav it often has a true future meaning. I’ll talk about that next week. Damn. That’s six things.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved