Fact-Checking the Torah -- Olrik and archaeology agree

Oral narratives are stories transmitted by word of mouth for some time, possibly surviving until somebody records them.  Of all the oral narratives that could have been invented in ancient times, a relatively small number survive due to limitations of human memory and possibly also audience interest.  How do narratives originate?

In the interests of the culture that winds up transmitting them.  I cannot emphasize this point enough. A narrative not only will not survive if the culture has no interest in it, it also will not originate unless it expresses something crucial to the culture where it appears.

Olrik says that oral narratives always reflect a historical or cultural truth familiar to the narrator and audience.  The narratives originate close in time and place to the historical event or the inception of the cultural trait, and begin as more or less realistic accounts.  This is the analog of what William Dever and other archaeologists said about DH: it is false that an ancient culture retroactively invents its own history in writing, projecting events back before the culture had writing. The “Brutus” story of Britain’s origins originated in the minds of literate people who had read Roman history; it did not reflect what British oral narratives said of the origins of the Britons – about which the French Plantagenets had no clue and didn’t give a toss.

An oral narrative starts life as a reflection of the real world of the culture.  The analog of this process occurs within each narrative.  Among Olrik’s Epic Laws are the Law of Opening and the Law of Closing.  The Law of Opening says each narrative begins with words reflecting the real world.  The Law of Closing says each narrative ends with words reflecting the real world.

Examples of this exist in Torah.  Over and over, it repeats the phrase “and it is there to this day.”  This phrase comes up in Joshua as well.  This is the Law of Closing in some narratives of Torah.

Conversely, the Law of Opening is explicit in those Torah narratives that begin “this is the account of the generations of X,” X being some character well-known to the audience.

The feedback loop I tried to describe reinforces the fact that a narrative arises in and is transmitted within its own culture and records something about that culture.  As a microcosm of the culture, each listener in the audience is going to prefer listening to something about himself than something about others.  He will prefer things about his own community to things about other communities. Those are the narratives the audience asks for time and again.  The narratives that survive in a community or a culture will be the ones discussing that community or culture.

Conversely, when I said that a narrative comes to the end of its survival period, it should be obvious that this happens when the culture no longer considers that narrative as being “about itself.”  Nobody is left to whom the narrative matters, it decays and dies.

Somewhere in the course of this process, says Olrik, bits and pieces of the narrative may survive in other narratives as an opening that says “once upon a time where we stand now…” followed by a reference to an action that happened there and that was the subject of the forgotten narrative.  These “survivals” can include a proverb, or an action.  Olrik records a custom of bowing to a corner of an ancient structure as relating to a forgotten narrative about something that happened at that location.

And so a narrative need not simply describe a life, it has a life of its own, a birth, a maturation, and a death.

But what it doesn't have is universal appeal...

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:24-25, prepositions with suffixes

Genesis 1:24-25

כד וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֗ים תּוֹצֵ֨א הָאָ֜רֶץ נֶ֤פֶשׁ חַיָּה֙ לְמִינָ֔הּ בְּהֵמָ֥ה וָרֶ֛מֶשׂ וְחַֽיְתוֹ־אֶ֖רֶץ לְמִינָ֑הּ וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן:

כה וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִים֩ אֶת־חַיַּ֨ת הָאָ֜רֶץ לְמִינָ֗הּ וְאֶת־הַבְּהֵמָה֙ לְמִינָ֔הּ וְאֵ֛ת כָּל־רֶ֥מֶשׂ הָֽאֲדָמָ֖ה לְמִינֵ֑הוּ וַיַּ֥רְא אֱלֹהִ֖ים כִּי־טֽוֹב:

Translation:     Gd said let the earth bring out living soul of its kind, domestic animal and creeper and wild animals of the earth of its kind; it must have been so.

            Gd must have made the wild animal for its kind, the domestic animal for its kind, all the creepers of the earth for its kind; Gd must have manifested goodness.

Vocabulary in this lesson:

בְּהֵמָה	Domestic animal
רֶמֶשׂ	Creeper
חַיְתוֹ־אֶרֶץ	wild animal
אֲדָמָה	Ground, earth, soil

There are four one-letter prepositions in BH:

l’ meaning “to”, “for”, “for  the purpose of”, and possession.

b’ meaning “in”, “at the time of”, “by means of”, and “against”.

k' meaning “in the same way as,”, “as soon as”, “according to”.

me (mi or min) meaning “from”, “due to”, “beyond”, and “than”. 

L’ and b’ combine with object suffixes as follows.  The other two prepositions can’t do this and I’ll go into them either when we have a verse with no other important grammar point, or when we have a verse that uses one.

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
לִי	לָנוּ	First
לְךָ	לָכֶם	Second/masculine
לָךְ	לָכֶן	Second/feminine
לוֹ	לָהֶם	Third/masculine
לָהּ	לָהֶן	Third/feminine

Look at the second person singular feminine form.  There is a shva for the last consonant and instead of being underneath, it’s on the left.  The kaph sofit form goes below the line of the writing, so the vowel goes to the left.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

Garden -- taking advantage

Once upon a time I looked at my front yard before I mowed, and there was a hyacinth plant in the middle of it.

I transplanted it next to the doorstep. It's below freezing this morning but...

Just because you didn't plant it doesn't mean it's a weed. Find out what it is and take advantage of the unexpected.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- oral narrative survival

Written material survives as long as the recording medium survives. An oral narrative may survive only during the lifetime of the original narrator, or it may survive a few of what I call hops, or it may survive for millennia. Why?

Because the types and quantity of recording media are large and more or less lasting. Survival of an oral narrative depends on human memory, which is proverbially fragile. A human lives at most 120 years so far; many die at half that age. And it is proverbial that the older a person gets, the more fragile the memory.

What survives a given narrator doesn’t depend completely on that narrator. It requires that somebody in the audience values the narrative so much as to pass it on when the previous narrator dies. A narrative might not survive its originator. If the audience doesn’t want to hear it, they’ll walk away when the narrator begins it. The audience may also take an active role in preserving a narrative by asking for it over and over.

That contributes to survival because it refreshes the story not only in the narrator’s mind but also in the audience’s mind, and may inspire somebody who wants to be the narrator for the next generation, to memorize that specific story.

This feedback loop is implicit in what Olrik says about survival of narratives, but he never studied narrator-audience feedback specifically. That work has yet to be done, but we see something like it even now, when kids ask their parents to read a particular book over and over until it becomes grimy and ragged. And after that, if not before, the child can often fill in what the grime has obscured, from memory.

This implies that the stories that do survive should copy how they were originally told, but Olrik says that never happens. The longer the narrative survives, the more it will change, for several reasons.

First, the narrator forgets details. If the audience doesn’t call out a correction, the narrator may use a related but different set of words for a character’s actions. 

Second, the narrator tries out her own ideas of how the story should work. This can include showing an increase of sympathy for a minor character – which can morph into an independent narrative about that character – or providing rational grounds for an otherwise non-rational situation or act.

Third, the narrator will realize that the audience is losing the thread because of words they don’t use any more, or that they use with a different meaning. The narrator will substitute “modern” words, or will use words that match the meaning of the narrative but differ from the words previously used.

This last point in no way equates to the language layering of DH. It is not the influence of one language on another. It’s the difference between what the audience knows and what the earlier narrators knew, such as calling a place both Sukkot and Pi-Tum. Preserving the older word in a narrative requires something else in the narrative that reinforces the older word. In the story of finding a wife for Yitschaq, we have the term mesheq. Nobody knows what it means any more, so in my book Narrating the Torah I don’t translate it. It might have been preserved because of its resemblance to mashqah, draw water so somebody can drink, an important part of the evidence that Rivqah was the girl the servant was looking for. But that was thousands of years ago and we don’t know the real reason for keeping mesheq in the story.

What we do know is the reason oral narratives arise.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

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.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

DIY -- sourdough reservations

Here's a changeup! I haven't written DIY for a long time.

Having developed some nice strong rye and white sourdough starter, I tried new waters.

Luckily they weren't uncharted.

I decided to see what happens if you use sourdough in bagels and croissants, with no domestic yeast at all.

The answer was predictable. You can't get the nice big bagels or croissants without the domestic yeast. They do rise, but not much.

The croissant recipe I used is online and it uses 5 TABLESPOONS of sugar. Way too much for my taste.

So I guess what I'll be doing is buying a strip of domestic yeast and baking a batch each of bagels, English muffins and croissants.

Of course, I will be eating the croissants fresh, but the other two freeze well in my experience.

OTOH, since I'm limiting my grains to two servings a day, baking loaves of sourdough bread means having way too much in the freezer or going stale on the counter.

So what I do is make up dough for only one loaf, and then split it into 6 or 8, roll into balls and flatten. These rise and bake faster than loaves and are great for sandwiches or toasted cheese and bread which is my favorite supper.

Oh yeah, sourdough is a great pizza crust, too.

So in case you were wondering what else you can do with sourdough, there it is. As Julia Child would say, bon appetit!

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Narrative definition

Olrik’s book is called Principles of Oral Narrative Research. It contains the standards and the definitions that are either missing, minimized, or ignored in DH. That is the first thing that makes it superior to DH.

Let’s start with the obvious definition. What is an oral narrative?

An oral narrative is material passed along by word of mouth, face to face, person to person(s), that tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It has at least one character who plays a role in the action. It has at least one episode. Most of the time it goes more than one hop (transmission between at least two people) before somebody records it. At that point its content and expression are fixed and, unless somebody continues transmitting it orally, its life as an oral narrative ends. It always illustrates one or more facets of the culture in which it transmits and which it purports to be about. It is never possible to consult the people who were the first to transmit an oral narrative at the time that questions arise about the truth of its contents.

Olrik defined three kinds of oral narrative based on the Danish narratives he was familiar with.

A lay is told in verse, often with elaborate expressions, at some length, even though it may tell of only one episode in a much larger story. It tends to undergo leapwise changes compared to other versions of the same narrative.

A saga is not told in verse, goes to some length, often has multiple episodes. Olrik classed the simple tale here, as well as historical sagas which may span centuries, and the heroic tale in the sense of a tale about a reputed ancestor displaying superior or superlative forms of the habits or morals of the culture transmitting the tale.

A legend is often one episode, with one character. The legend ends with an exclamation by the character that encapsulates his situation, his character, or the issue expressed by the legend. Origin legends tend to relate to a specific location and tell about the origin of a people or a custom. Olrik termed all other legends anecdotes.

The first thing to notice is that Olrik’s principles apply only to narratives. They don’t apply to legalistic material. Trying to find examples of the Epic Laws in the “thou shalts” of Torah is work done in vain. But the narratives in Leviticus or Deuteronomy, such as the death of Nadav and Avihu, or the Talmudic story of the four sages who saw Paradise, might have features that correspond to Olrik’s principles.

It’s pretty obvious that the Iliad, with its hexameter, ought to be a lay, and it indeed tells a very small part of the entire 20 years of the war, but goes on for 12 books.

It’s also pretty obvious that Genesis is an example of a saga, and a heroic saga at that.

In among that, the two Lemekh stories that I discussed a long time ago are examples of legends. Read them again and notice the closing exclamations.

You can imagine narrators of past millennia, taken over all of human history and prehistory, telling millions of tales, but a relatively small number have survived. Olrik confirms that, and provides a reason that affects important issues internal to each narrative. That's for next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- purposeful speech

Genesis 1:22

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

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

Get to know lemor very well, it’s a high-frequency word.

It’s an aspectless verb with a l’ prefix, which you saw before.  I said then that while this prefix can often mean “to” or “for”, with an aspectless verb it has the nuance “for the purpose of”.

The structure is always a verb of speech in the narrative past, then possibly the speaker (unless it’s understood from the context), then lemor, and the lemor is often marked with the etnach like it is here.  (You have been keeping up with marking where the etnach is haven’t you?)

The idea that Gd would bless life forms for the purpose of saying something is not how we’re used to thinking of it in English.  The translations all have “saying”, as if what was said was a consequence of the blessing and not the blessing being the consequence of Gd’s purpose in speaking.

As you read your Biblical Hebrew, watch for lemor as introducing the purpose of Gd’s communication, not the consequence of His speaking.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights  Reserved

Knitting -- Adventures in Argyle 6, complete instructions

So the whole pullover goes like this.

0.  You download the basic argyle pattern which is here.
http://freevintageknitting.com/free-sweater-pattern/cm736/ladys-argyle-pullover

You use your spreadsheet to chart this. You can shorten the diamonds if you want, and it will probably help your lines to work out properly.

Pick your colors and show them (approximately) on your base chart, then replicate it onto your stitch count for a pullover in your size. Make sure you have complete diamonds at the shoulders and hem and mark where the underarm goes, but don't worry about the underarm being at the top of a complete diamond.

Now mark where the lines will go if you are going to have them.

1.  Cable on your hem to a size 5 24-inch circular needle, and join leaving a long tail to show you where the stitch wrap goes to prevent gaps at the underarm where the rounds end/begin.  You should also run a marker thread up on the other side where the other underarm will be.

2.  Do your rib, switch to size 7 24-inch circular needle, and knit one round above that.

3.  Add in a bobbin of the diamond color for the one-stitch point of the first diamond, then go back to your rib color. Add another bobbin in diamond color for each single stitch at the base of the diamonds evenly around the row.

4.  When you get back to your tail, knit the bottom diamond stitch in that same color.

5. Add another stitch in the same color here, lock your colors, and make 3 stitches in this row for every diamond. When you get back to the first diamond above the tail, knit the very last stitch of the round so this diamond also has three stitches in this round. Here's the video for how to lock colors Fair Isle style on the knit side. You need Adobe Flash to run the video.
https://www.philosopherswool.com/Pages/Twohandedvideo.htm

6.  Wrap the middle stitch of the first diamond to close the gap, and turn to purl. Here's the video for how to wrap stitches on both knit and purl sides.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fb7nf2pP0

7. Work the pattern in alternating purl and knit rounds, locking colors at the edges of the diamonds, and doing the purl-wrap at the end of the round before turning the work to knit the next round.
FOLLOW YOUR CHART OBSESSIVELY
Remember to add in a second bobbin for the diamond under the arm to let you work to the middle of the first diamond without creating floaties.  Here's the video for wrapping colors on the purl side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWHr3PH0RHg

8.  Work up to the armpit. Your spreadsheet chart should not worry about making sure that you have whole diamonds at the armpit, just when you get to the shoulders. Here I did something unusual for me.

On my chart, I would lose the outsides of the diamonds if I worked the underarm as I usually do with a pullover.
It turns out that with 55 rows/rounds above the armpit, my sleeves are very roomy at the top.
So you have a choice.
Divide the armholes 55 rows below the shoulders on your chart, but don't put the armpit stitches on a holder
OR
Work to 50 rows below the shoulders and make the armpits, sacrificing part of the diamonds.

The sleeve will have about the same number of stitches, 110, in its largest round at the top.

Now you are going to work the front and back separately. You will NOT use steeking, unlike my basic pullover pattern.
I got out two size 7 16-inch circular needles to work one side and left the other side on the size 7 24-inch needle.
You'll end with a complete diamond in diamond color at the shoulders..
You'll knit off your shoulders as usual (23 stitches front and back on each side of the neck), matching the top stitches of the diamonds in front and back.

NOW you can use that stitch wrapping technique again before you knit the neck round.
Then do your rib for the neck and bind off in rib.

 



This picture shows the inside so you can see the pattern made by locking the colors.

9.  Now add your lines. Here's the video for how to do duplicate stitch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9St7SyHOeJA

10  Now pick up around the armhole with a size 7 16 inch circular needle. Use the technique I talked about with lace making, where you pull the edge out and pick up through that little horizontal bit of yarn. Here's the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgM7xTZT54E

Knit your sleeve in the round as you would do for a Fair Isle pullover, decreasing at the underarm down to the cuff. Make sure and switch to size 7 double point needles when the tether pulls the sleeve tight, and use size 5 double points for the cuff.

11.  Turn inside out and lock down all the ends of the yarn from the lines. You can unravel them and tie them to other unraveled ends or just knot the full threads or if the ends are long enough, you can wind them into the backs of the stitches and trust to your first wash-and-block to hackle them down.

Here's one final lesson learned. What if you step away from the work and when you come back, you can't remember if you're knitting this round or purling?

I have to admit this happened over lunch one day. I had just finished a round and when I had washed the lunch dishes, I picked up my work and found that my needles were close to some diamond yarn, but if I worked in the direction I thought I was supposed to, I would come up against more of the same color at the boundary of the diamond. That's a good sign you're about to work in the wrong direction.

The other saver was that I was close to the point of an increasing diamond, and I remembered that I had knit the round before that point. So I counted up from the knit round and sure enough, I was about to purl when I should be knitting.

People who work with markers probably color code; they put a marker of one color on a knit round and another color on a purl round, and they never have this problem. I just don't like fussing with lots of tiny things because I have a nasty habit of losing them. I even lose important stuff like a whole circular needle set.

YMMV.

Here's the finished top.

It took me almost a month to knit this, almost as long as with the Fair Isle top, but partly that is because I made so many mistakes with the diamonds getting started, and partly it is because of having to watch the videos and try out the new techniques.  For example, it took me a while to get the hang of duplicate stitch but once I did, the lines went vi geshmirt as we say in The Tribe. Again, I hope I've inspired you instead of scaring you. 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Beyond DH

You thought I was done?

Anybody can tear something down. The real mavens can build something up. Here’s where I try to be a real maven.

Is there any way to understand why Torah reads the way it does, now that we know DH is neither scientific nor logical, and only infinitesimally likely to be true?

There are two answers.  I’ll give you the long one first.  The other I am still studying in Narrating the Torah to make sure I’ve connected all the dots and I’ll discuss it briefly later.

For over a century, there has been a schema for describing orally transmitted narratives called the Epic Laws.  Its features appear in Danish tales and ballads, in Grimm, it has examples in the Mwindo epic of Africa, in the tale of Enki and Ninmah from Sumeria where they spoke an isolate ergative language, in the first chapters of China’s Romance of Three Kingdoms, and in Popol Vuh from the Americas.  Hermann Gunkel, a DH scholar, heard of it in the early 1900s and corresponded with the professor lecturing on it, a Dane named Axel Olrik.

What’s more, it’s part of an analysis schema that few have heard of.  While the Epic Laws were published in German in 1908, the rest of Olrik’s notes existed only in Danish until 1992 when a complete English translation was done.  I read it in my nearby university library, all 200 pages in one afternoon of 2003, and decided I had to buy it so I could study it carefully.

The Epic Laws cropped up in 2013 when I was translating the Mendel Beilis trial transcript.  In the Beilis trial transcript, I found that the woman actually responsible for the murder of Andrey Yushchinsky, had to give her carpet to her landlord to pay part of a debt. Two years later it was rumored that she kept the boy’s bloody corpse, rolled up in the carpet, in her house for three days, despite the fact that she had been subjected to a search two days before the murder and sent her gang to Moscow to avoid arrest for a robbery carried out within 24 hours of the murder.  At trial this evidence about the carpet turned out to be gossip, a classic form of oral narrative, and “three days” is a classic example of one of the Epic Laws.

We know that Torah has high level features in common with Talmud, which everybody (except Astruc) knows developed in oral transmission.  At a lower level, we find numerous examples of Olrik’s principles.  My third description provides a mid-level structure.

I will also show that Olrik’s work coordinates with features identified in Dr. Cook’s 2002 dissertation, and with SWLT.  And it reinforces the relationship between Torah and archaeology when archaeological claims avoid fallacies like weak analogy or false argument from silence.  This is the opposite from what I demonstrated for DH.

Here we go.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- piel/polel comparison

Genesis 1:20-21

כ וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ הַמַּ֔יִם שֶׁ֖רֶץ נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה וְעוֹף֙ יְעוֹפֵ֣ף עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ עַל־פְּנֵ֖י רְקִ֥יעַ הַשָּׁמָֽיִם:

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.

First verb issue. There are two verb root classes that some writers mix up just because they look alike without the vowels. Remember what I said a couple of lessons ago about that?

Here, “fly” is in piel imperfect. It is a “hollow verb”; its middle letter is vav (middle letter in yod is also a hollow verb).  The dictionary form is עוֹף. 

Singular	Person/gender
אֲעוֹפֵף	First
תְּעוֹפֵף	Second/masculine
תְּעוֹפְפִי	Second/feminine

And so on.  Notice that the vowel under the first peh is tseire. That’s the clue that this is piel.

Here are the same three forms for a verb that really has duplicate letters. This verb root class is called polel or sometimes ayin ayin (don’t ask me why, I will call them polel).

Singular	Person/gender
אֲחַבֵּב	First
תְּחַבֵּב	Second/masculine
תְּחַבְּבִי	Second/feminine

This verb has a dagesh-able letter in the middle. I chose it because of the chet, another of those gutturals, which seems to have grammatical relationships with ayin.

Here’s a polel verb without a guttural.

Singular	Person/gender
אֲבַסֵּס	First
תְּבַסֵּס	Second/masculine
תְּבַסְּסִי	Second/feminine

And here’s a hollow verb using vav in piel that DOESN’T double the last letter.

Singular	Person/gender
אֲכַוֵּן	First
תְּכַוֵּן	Second/masculine
תְּכַוְּנִי	Second/feminine

The vav in this verb is pronounced “v”, not “u”.

You’re probably tearing your hair out wondering how you’re going to remember all this but unlike some teachers, I am never going to ask you to reproduce these conjugations. I have them here to show you that a hollow verb is not a polel even if it doubles a letter in piel or any other form (there are two other possibilities).  Polel verbs mostly show up in piel, pual, and hitpael (more on those later) but some of them are also used in nifal, hifil, and even qal.

Notice that the alef in the first person singular has a chataf vowel under it instead of the shva under the first letters in the other forms. This is what I meant by gutturals requiring chataf vowels instead of shva. 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights Reserved