21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:5 -- dagesh 2

Genesis 1:5

 

ה וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לָיְלָה וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר יוֹם אֶחָד:

 

Transliteration: Va-yiqra elohim la-or yom v’la-choshekh qara lailah va-y’hi-erev va-y’hi-voqer yom echad.

Translation:     Gd named the light day and the darkness He named night; there was evening and there was morning one day.

Letters in this lesson: ק

Vocabulary in this lesson:

 

יִּקְרָא	call (to), call by name, name
לָ	Indirect object preposition, genitive preposition, possessive
יוֹם	day
לָיְלָה	night
עֶרֶב	evening
בֹקֶר	morning
אֶחָד	one

 

Notice that in the first word, after va with the patach, the yod takes dagesh. Also notice that toward the end of the verse, after va-y’hi, it’s not boqer, it’s voqer. But notice after the other y’hi, there’s no dagesh in the ayin. Ayin is a letter that never takes dagesh. (What are the others?) Also notice that after voqer, the yod in yom does NOT take dagesh. The word before the yod ended in a resh, not a vowel as at the start of the verse. Are you starting to see a pattern?

 

The word, parsed to produce CVC or CV syllables, is vay-yiq-ra.

 

Then you have vay-hi-vo-qer.

 

And in the third case, listening to the audio, I can hear vay-hi-[gh]e-rev.

 

At the start of words, ayin has a slight [gh] sound which probably led to calling it a glottal stop, and which supports its not taking dagesh by letting ayin serve as the consonant BH requires at the start of a syllable. You can hear it in audio files that I’ll give you a link  to later.

 

It probably also led to the name “Gomorrah”. In BH, this name starts with ayin. When the Septuagint translators heard it, they matched it to the Greek gamma which has a somewhat similar sound. And the rest is history.

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