21st Century Bible Hebrew -- intro to oblique modality

Genesis 2:6

 

וְאֵ֖ד יַֽעֲלֶ֣ה מִן־הָאָ֑רֶץ וְהִשְׁקָ֖ה אֶת־כָּל־פְּנֵ֥י הָֽאֲדָמָֽה:

 

Translation:     But a mist went up from the earth; it watered all the surface of the earth.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

אֵד	mist
יַעֲלֶה	Went up
הִשְׁקָה	Water (v)

 

“went up” is conjugated exactly like “to do, make”. These are both important words so learn this conjugation very well.  Alah is one of the verbs that show up as certainty epistemics just like asah.

 

Now an important point about vav. In the last verse as well as this one, I translated it “but”. As with Genesis 1:2, vav in these verses corrects a mistaken impression you might get from the preceding verse. So it has to be translated “but”, not “and”.

 

Now notice we have an imperfect aspect verb here. The noun splits it from the vav.

 

Remember that narrative past is vav plus the verb plus the subject. So this is not narrative past.

 

The other possibility with this verb conjugation, as you have been taught in older courses, is future.

 

But there’s no way this is future.

 

This is another classic use of imperfect, for something repeated or iterated. The mist went up over and over again.

 

Now find the etnach and notice what happens after it.

 

Hishqah is a perfect aspect verb in hifil. You would think, if the mist went up over and over again, the earth would be watered over and over again, so why perfect aspect?

 

This is a modality I haven’t discussed before called oblique modality.

 

The syntax is vav plus a perfect aspect verb plus the subject if expressed.

 

It never occurs alone; this is always a subordinate clause. The main clause may be in the same verse but sometimes it is in a separate verse.

 

It can indicate cause, effect, purpose or result. Dr. Cook says it can reflect a condition; this will be a resultative situation typical of perfect aspect verbs.

 

It is not a done deal. The audience is asked to believe this happened on the basis of something known to happen generally or specified in previous material. It tends to be restricted to narratives; vav plus perfect in legal material is something quite different.

Here the effect of the mist going up is to water the world. But like the certainty epistemic, it looks both ways. Everybody knows plants can’t survive without water.  We just said that there were plants. How did they survive without water, given that we just said Gd had not yet caused rain? So this verse explains that by means of a mist.

 

This is an example of how you can't understand any single thing in Torah without the rest of it. The meaning of this verse relies on everything surrounding it, and that will be true of the rest of this narrative.