21st Century Bible Hebrew -- example of combined grammar

I'm posting this early because tomorrow is the first day of Passover and I don't want to deprive you of something to do while you are on lockdown.

Now let me sum up how some of these new forms play together. Here’s Deuteronomy 8:19.

וְהָיָ֗ה אִם־שָׁכֹ֤חַ תִּשְׁכַּח֙ אֶת־יְהוָֹ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ וְהָֽלַכְתָּ֗ אַֽחֲרֵי֙ אֱלֹהִ֣ים אֲחֵרִ֔ים וַֽעֲבַדְתָּ֖ם וְהִשְׁתַּֽחֲוִ֣יתָ לָהֶ֑ם הַֽעִדֹ֤תִי בָכֶם֙ הַיּ֔וֹם כִּ֥י אָבֹ֖ד תֹּֽאבֵדֽוּן:

So first we have v’hayah which means “from now on.” Moshe is in the first third of his speech on the border of the Holy Land and he has just run through Israelite history, so he has shown them what happened to their parents who disobeyed or were presumptuous. The book of Numbers is all about the punishment of the presumptuous. By the end of it there’s a real feeling that the next generation has learned from the mistakes of their parents.

Next there’s a duplicate conditional. After all that Moshe has seen in the last 40 years, he has come to realize that a few people don’t learn from their own experience or from the experience of others. So in a sense this phrase means he understands that forgetting is due to human nature and not deliberately evil.

Now that he has accepted how stupid people can be, he is also willing to accept the possible consequence v’halakhta, that they might turn to other gods and worship them.

And the final duplicate conditional, avod t’ovedun. Which is a real mishmash. The final word is not imperfect aspect, it’s an uncertainty epistemic. Moshe has stated the conditions under which the Israelites might be destroyed, and so this ought to be a straight conditional. But he has iced the cake with the uncertainty ending because – anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

These people still might not have learned their lesson.

Wait, there’s more. Remember tokhelu, the permissive/prescriptive form? Well, tovedun is an uncertainty epistemic based on a permissive/prescriptive form, that’s why there’s a tseire under the bet instead of a shva. Gd will do everything in His power to avoid letting it come to this, but He will only suffer so much and then He will allow himself to destroy the Israelites.

If it seems like I dwell too much on the role that law plays in the Torah, I have two data points for you. Olrik learned of a people, the Fjoort of Africa, who used to hold marathon tale-telling sessions with the entire population present. If that sounds like the convocation discussed in Deuteronomy 31:10ff during the shemittah year, read on.

Roger Abrahams wrote of the Fjoort, in his book African Folktales, that they would convene to decide tribal issues and would tell folk tales. He couldn’t understand why.

Olrik says there is a cultural or historical issue behind every oral narrative. Neither he nor Abrahams realized that the tales the Fjoort recited at these sessions were illustrations of the legal issues involved in legal cases. They were holding law classes, rehearsing the case studies supporting a decision in a specific case that was before them.

Almost every narrative in Torah has a legal issue, sometimes more than one, at its roots. I say “almost” to cover myself in case I have forgotten one that surprised me because it didn’t have this feature. When the narrators told these stories, they were teaching the “young idea how to shoot”. Yes, I know that’s not what the quote really means, but the point is that the narratives shepherded the audience in the way of behaving according to the norms illustrated in the narratives, using every morphological tool in the language to draw the audience’s attention to crucial points.

What’s more, once we get to Exodus, every tranche of laws is followed by a narrative that would be incomprehensible without the foregoing material. In Leviticus 10, why did Mosheh get wrapped around the axles about whether Aharon and his two surviving sons had eaten a sin-offering? Because, according to Leviticus 1-5, failing to eat that part of that sin offering could cause Gd to invoke the punishment of keret.

Remember, Mosheh consecrated five priests. Two already died for disobeying commandments about tabernacle ritual. When he found out that the last three had also erred, he must have been close to having a stroke. Aharon’s answer basically means that mourners can’t eat sacrifices, and Mosheh calms down. If you want a citation to the page in Talmud that endorses Aharon’s claim, let me know.

There’s more on the Fact-Checking page about how Torah is structured.