21st Century Bible Hebrew -- duplicate unconditional

And there is the grammatical counterpart to mot tamut, a “duplicate unconditional.”

When you have the aspectless verb followed by the same verb root and binyan in a perfect aspect, you are not looking at a conditional situation. You are looking at an absolute situation.

An example would be Genesis 27:30.

וַיְהִי כַּאֲשֶׁר כִּלָּה יִצְחָק לְבָרֵךְ אֶת־יַעֲקֹב וַיְהִי אַךְ יָצֹא יָצָא יַעֲקֹב מֵאֵת פְּנֵי יִצְחָק אָבִיו וְעֵשָׂו אָחִיו בָּא מִצֵּידוֹ:

It must have been as soon as Yitschaq finished blessing Yaaqov, it must have been just as Yaaqov absolutely left the presence of Yitschaq his father, Esav his brother just coming from his hunting.

I translated ba as progressive, “just then” instead of perfective, “finished coming”. The whole verse is about two things happening at the same instant, with some real narrative tension going on.

This is unusual. An evidentiary epistemic like va-y’hi is normally followed by a narrative past, although  sometimes there is intervening material. An example of a delayed narrative past is Genesis 14:1-10 where there’s a mini-sidebar from verses 2 to 6 inclusive and verse 7 opens with the narrative past. The progressive ba may be a substitute, the way eyn substitutes for imperfect in the verse about Sarai not having children that I already discussed.

The second evidentiary epistemic is followed by the duplicate conditional.

My claim is that the duplicate conditional invokes the law, but duplicate unconditional cuts off legal consequences. How does that work here?

Notice that they escape the situation where Esav could have killed Yaaqov right then and there. Since Yitschaq was blind, there would be no witnesses to this killing, and since there was no enmity between the brothers before, it would have been only manslaughter. Yaaqov would still be dead, and Esav would have to flee to a city of refuge – and there were none at the time, a link between Esav and Qain.

Some relative would have been responsible for hunting down Esav. Who would do such a thing? What about Yishmael? But the next thing we learn is that Esav marries a daughter of Yishmael, so the old man is out of the loop for avenging his half-nephew on his son-in-law. Torah eliminates all these issues with a two-word phrase pointing out that they never mattered.

Another good example is from the Yosef story, Genesis 40:15. When Yosef is talking to the chief butler before interpreting his dream, Yosef says this:

כִּֽי־גֻנֹּ֣ב גֻּנַּ֔בְתִּי מֵאֶ֖רֶץ הָֽעִבְרִ֑ים וְגַם־פֹּה֙ לֹֽא־עָשִׂ֣יתִי מְא֔וּמָה כִּֽי־שָׂמ֥וּ אֹתִ֖י בַּבּֽוֹר:

My status is having been stolen from the land of the Hebrews; also here I didn’t do anything to result in being put into the pit.

That’s a duplicate unconditional using the pual. In narratives, pual is one step before the denouement, as with the finishing of heaven and earth, immediately followed by the real denouement, creation of Shabbat. In legal situations, pual is one step before hufal, a legal definition like yumat allowing an execution if reached by due process. With pual there are still issues to resolve before legal action can be taken.

In this case, there are multiple ways that Yosef could have become a slave. One is to commit a theft of property that he could not pay off. When the court determines that you are a thief, you have to make restitution in one lump sum. If you can’t, the court can take out an exclusive services contract on you in the value of the theft, and you have to work it off unless the other party to the contract forgives your debt to him.

Another possibility is Yosef taking out the contract on himself for some reason. As an adult (he was 17 at the time), he had that right.

Finally, there’s the possibility that somebody kidnapped Yosef so as to sell him into slavery. This is a capital crime in Judaism.

At the end of the verse, when Yosef says “and here too I didn’t do anything wrong,” he’s denying being a thief so his being in the pit is not the step before selling him to pay restitution.

But before that, he uses a duplicate unconditional in pual to say “don’t get wrapped around the axles trying to convict anybody of kidnapping me. I don’t have the witnesses necessary to try a capital crime. We have bigger fish to fry; let’s be about it.”

While writing Narrating the Torah, wherever I came across a duplicate unconditional, I stopped to analyze what laws it would cut off. And it worked every time, although I had to do some legal research to get there. Its use suggests two things.

One comes directly from Olrik’s principles: Genesis is a heroic saga about ancestors who provide examples of cultural behavior. The other is that Genesis is about patriarchal law as it existed before the Egyptian Oppression, which occurred between 1700 and 1628 BCE.