21st Century Bible Hebrew -- gam and the aspectless verb

It's Passover Put-away Day so here's something to read when you're tired of putting away Passover dishes.

I’m not done with the aspectless gerundive yet. 

Remember way back when I said that gam is really an emphatic and it seems to need a substantive?  It never appears with anything formed from imperfect aspect – not imperatives, not narrative past, not a duplicate conditional. Probably the best example is Genesis 31:15.

הֲלוֹא נָכְרִיּוֹת נֶחְשַׁבְנוּ לוֹ כִּי מְכָרָנוּ וַיֹּאכַל גַּם־אָכוֹל אֶת־כַּסְפֵּנוּ:

Now, if this was a simple duplicate conditional, it would read akhol yokhal, but that would imply that it’s OK with Rachel and Leah that their father used up all the income Yaaqov provided without bequeathing any of it to their children. It’s not OK. They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more.

Emphasizing this consumption with gam to emphasize what has happened requires insulating it from that imperfect aspect verb. It takes an aspectless gerundive to do that. Numbers 23:25 is a more extreme example, using aspectless gerundives to insulate gam from two different imperatives which, as you know, are formed from the imperfect aspect.

So now, look at Genesis 46:4.

אָנֹכִי אֵרֵד עִמְּךָ מִצְרַיְמָה וְאָנֹכִי אַעַלְךָ גַם־עָלֹה וְיוֹסֵף יָשִׁית יָדוֹ עַל־עֵינֶיךָ:

We’re insulating gam from the certainty epistemic aalkha which, like all epistemics, is based on imperfect. This hasn’t happened yet. Yaaqov is still alive. Gam aloh, with the aspectless gerundive, ignores the timing factor completely.

Of course, from the point of view of the narrator and his audience, this has already happened. The narrator can use the certainty epistemic because if it weren’t for the coming back to the Holy Land after the oppression, the narrator and his audience wouldn’t be in the Holy Land at the point where this grammar became fixed.

But Yaaqov isn’t there yet. He has 17 more years to live. He won’t die in the Holy Land, unlike his father and grandfather. Gd is reassuring him that he really will occupy his niche in Makhpelah, where he buried Leah. Gd uses gam for this, and using gam, He has to use it with the aspectless gerundive because, as I keep saying, there’s no other grammar that will work here.

This explanation also helped me with Exodus 2:19.

וַתֹּאמַרְן ָ אִישׁ מִצְרִי הִצִּילָנוּ מִיַּד הָרֹעִים וְגַם־דָּלֹה דָלָה לָנוּ וַיַּשְׁקְ אֶת־הַצֹּאן:

After I realized what the duplicate unconditional did, I puzzled for a while over why there would be one here, because there’s no Jewish law involved with drawing water. Once I figured out the grammar of gam, I could see that the daloh was the other part of the gam phrase, and the dalah was the perfect verb for something that was over by the time R’uel’s daughters came back to tell him what happened.