21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:17, direct object pronouns

Genesis 1:17

יז וַיִּתֵּן אֹתָם אֱלֹהִים בִּרְקִיעַ הַשָּׁמָיִם לְהָאִיר עַל־הָאָרֶץ:

Translation:     Gd put them in the raqia of the heaven for the purpose of shedding light on the earth.

Hair is one of those verbs I warned you about. The root is spelled alef vav resh. You know that alef is a guttural, and if I didn’t say it before, I’ll say it now, resh often behaves like a guttural. But why do I say that the middle letter is vav?

In the qal imperfect, the 3^rd masculine singular is יָאוֹר. The vav drops out in some parts of the conjugation. In other parts yod is used instead of vav. There is a related verb root class called ayin yod which loses the yod in some parts of the conjugation.

This is not a high-frequency verb. When we get to one that is high-frequency in the same verb root class, I’ll give the conjugation then.

What is important in this verse is “them”, a direct object pronoun. It is based on et.

Singular	Plural
אוֹתִי	אֹתָנוּ	1st person
אוֹתְךָ	אֶתְכֶם	2nd masculine
אוֹתָךְ	אֶתְכֶן	2nd feminine
אֹתוֹ	אֹתָם	3rd masculine
אוֹתָהּ	אֹתָן	3rd feminine

Notice the 3^rd masculine singular never occurs in Torah with the long “o” after the first letter. I have no idea why not. It shows up almost 40 times in the rest of Tannakh, but not in Torah.

You will most often see these words if there is an et (אֵת or אֶת ) nearby but there are cases where those words aren’t there but these are.

Memorize this, it is a high-frequency set of words.

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