21st Century Bible Hebrew -- grammar and context

Genesis 2:7-8

ז וַיִּ֩יצֶר֩ יְהֹוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֜ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֗ם עָפָר֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה וַיִּפַּ֥ח בְּאַפָּ֖יו נִשְׁמַ֣ת חַיִּ֑ים וַיְהִ֥י הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְנֶ֥פֶשׁ חַיָּֽה:

ח וַיִּטַּ֞ע יְהוָֹ֧ה אֱלֹהִ֛ים גַּ֥ן־בְּעֵ֖דֶן מִקֶּ֑דֶם וַיָּ֣שֶׂם שָׁ֔ם אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֖ם אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָצָֽר:

Translation:     **** Gd formed the man dust, from the earth, He breathed into his nose the soul of life; he must have become a living soul.

**** Gd planted a garden in Eden toward the east; He placed there the man whom He had formed.

So last time I said that you morphological grammarians are in trouble because the form of the 3rd masculine and feminine singular in perfect aspect of ayin yod verbs is identical to the masculine and feminine singular of the progressive aspect, and the normal word order is also identical.

You can only tell them apart if you know how they function in a sentence.

I said that there were exactly eight ways to use progressive and here they are. Memorize them. Because there are lots of perfect aspect verbs in Tannakh, and lots of ayin yod verbs in perfect aspect, but there won’t be many in progressive aspect – but there are other progressive aspect verbs in Tannakh, some of which we will see soon.

a.         present tense.
b.         action in progress.
c.         descriptive.
d.         immediate future, “about to X”.
e.         immediate past “has [just] X’d”.
f.          habitual.
g.         the sense in which an imperfect tense is used, that is, an action that was ongoing when something else happened.
h.         locative situations.
j.          X is “still” happening.

OK I lied: nine. However, progressive aspect as present tense is so extremely rare in Tannakh that you will mostly use one of the others.

You saw function (h) in Genesis 1:2: m’rachefet al-p’ney t’hom. It was also (b).

Now think back to Genesis 1:27 and naaseh. What that verse meant related to three things. One was that the verb was nifal, not the related but more common qal binyan. Another was the grammatical context of the narrative; naaseh as a singular verb coordinated with use of a singular verb in the next verse. A third was the cultural context: there is only one Gd in Judaism, which owns this narrative. The idea that naaseh referred to plural gods would never have come from inside Judaism.

Never think that you know what a word means without its sentence, a sentence without its episode, an episode without its narrative, a narrative without its culture.

In any literature of any culture. If you stop short of the full culture, you’re cheating yourself.

Understand; no natural languages would ever have existed if they didn’t facilitate communication in some culture, and the culture in which they were used had to distinguish between identical forms in order to communicate.  Communication is always about something in the culture. What a language means by what it says, is all about the consequences to the culture of whatever is said. So the meaning is about how the culture understands words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.

Here’s a place to make trouble if you ever have a Hebrew class in your bucket list. If your teacher gets up and tells you that you can’t tell the progressive and perfect of an ayin yod verb apart, ask about the sentence, the episode/paragraph, the narrative, and the culture. You have a legitimate gripe to the department if a full professor has too limited a perspective on a language she/he is teaching.