21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 4:25-26, qual binyan

Genesis 4:25-26

 

כה וַיֵּ֨דַע אָדָ֥ם עוֹד֙ אֶת־אִשְׁתּ֔וֹ וַתֵּ֣לֶד בֵּ֔ן וַתִּקְרָ֥א אֶת־שְׁמ֖וֹ שֵׁ֑ת כִּ֣י שָׁת־לִ֤י אֱלֹהִים֙ זֶ֣רַע אַחֵ֔ר תַּ֣חַת הֶ֔בֶל כִּ֥י הֲרָג֖וֹ קָֽיִן:

כו וּלְשֵׁ֤ת גַּם־הוּא֙ יֻֽלַּד־בֵּ֔ן וַיִּקְרָ֥א אֶת־שְׁמ֖וֹ אֱנ֑וֹשׁ אָ֣ז הוּחַ֔ל לִקְרֹ֖א בְּשֵׁ֥ם יְהוָֹֽה:

 

Translation:  Adam again knew his wife, she gave birth to a son, she named him Shet: “for Gd set for me other seed in place of Hevel,” for Qain had killed him.

To Shet, he, a son was born; he named him Enosh, then it was begun for the purpose of using the name of the Lord.

 

Vocabulary

הוּחַל

Was begun

 

Notice that l’shet  yulad, our consequential qual (in perfect aspect).  The consequences of this birth we will see shortly.  It’s agentless because Shet is not the one who gave birth, but we focus on him, not his wife, for reasons that Torah will go into shortly.

 

Notice the emphatic gam with hu; this is kind of like that structure I pointed out before where when a copula is understood, a nominative pronoun is used to set it off as the predicate.  This belongs here because the qual is quasi-predicate.

 

Huchal is hufal binyan.  In narratives, hufal seems to mean acting according to customary practice, so the last clause in verse 26 seems to describe a custom.  Rashi says that it meant that people forgot their ancestral traditions and began acting as if other things were gods than ****, the only real Gd. 

 

One of the neat things about nifal, pual, and hufal is how they go with legal systems.  In any culture that lasts long enough to develop a legal system, courts and so on, there are probably several generations of people.  These binyanim become important in a culture where the same legal methods are followed from generation to generation.  While there may be narrative examples of how the laws are applied, and they name individual people, they are basically reports on illustrative cases.  The agentless binyanim exist to show that the law doesn’t apply just to the people named as actors in the illustration; the law applies regardless of the names of the people who either judge cases or are tried for transgressions. 

 

Contrast this with the other binyanim which are used in the case reports or illustrative narratives.  I’ll show another reason for using them much later.

 

Notice that we have Adam’s third son here. This is another example of Olrik’s Law of Three, and the number three running throughout Tannakh. It’s also an example of how the youngest of three sons is the one that really matters, something you see in Greek myth (Kronos, Zeus) and in Grimms’ tales.

 

The audio for chapter 4 follows, also a link to the Hebrew text on the same site.

The audio:

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/mp3/t0104.mp3