21st Century Bible Hebrew -- participles

Some of you are screaming that I haven’t covered everything. No more I have. I haven’t talked about participles. Here’s the deal.

There are three verb forms in Biblical Hebrew that are gerundive, but apparently with different functions.

One is the progressive. It often is used gerundively and therefore works substantively but only when prefixed with the definite article. See Genesis 48:5.

 וְעַתָּה שְׁנֵי־בָנֶיךָ הַנּוֹלָדִים לְךָ בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם עַד־בֹּאִי אֵלֶיךָ מִצְרַיְמָה לִי־הֵם אֶפְרַיִם וּמְנַשֶּׁה כִּרְאוּבֵן וְשִׁמְעוֹן יִהְיוּ־לִי:

Ha-noladim means “who have been born”; it’s a modifying substantive from the nifal binyan. As such, it legitimizes Yosef’s sons. This might be the source of the midrash that their mother converted, because only the child of a Jewess can be considered a Jew. As a progressive, ha-noladim takes on the immediate past connotation in this context.

The aspectless gerundive is also naturally substantivized. The version that takes prepositions can operate as an adverb, as you see in Exodus 13:17, but the progressive and participle can’t.

וַיְהִי בְּשַׁלַּח פַּרְעֹה אֶת־הָעָם וְלֹא־נָחָם אֱלֹהִים דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ פְּלִשְׁתִּים כִּי קָרוֹב הוּא כִּי ׀ אָמַר אֱלֹהִים פֶּן־יִנָּחֵם הָעָם בִּרְאֹתָם מִלְחָמָה וְשָׁבוּ מִצְרָיְמָה:

This pretty much means “at the time of their seeing”.

The first participle I came across in Torah was Genesis 48:4 which goes like this:

וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלַי הִנְנִי מַפְרְךָ וְהִרְבִּיתִךָ וּנְתַתִּיךָ לִקְהַל עַמִּים וְנָתַתִּי אֶת־הָאָרֶץ הַזֹּאת לְזַרְעֲךָ אַחֲרֶיךָ אֲחֻזַּת עוֹלָם:

The bolded word is a hifil participle formed from the progressive, which most people would nowadays call an active present participle. Notice that it has an object suffix.  The reason we need a gerundive here is because of hin’ni, a relative of emphatic hineh, which has to be followed by a substantive. It’s bad grammar to use a progressive with a personal suffix. The quasi-descriptive nature of this word is not suitable for an aspectless verb. There aren’t many true participles in Torah, but this is one of them.

DIY -- in a world....

In my town our favorite grocery, a small business, hasn't had yeast or flour for at least a week. There are ways around that. I found an online outlet where I could order flour while I still had some in the house. They had several brands. You wouldn't recognize some of the brands but possibly they only  sell to food services including bakeries so that's more of a recommendation than a problem. The delivery date in the carrier's email is 10 business days from when I placed the order.

Once you get your flour you can breed yeast. I've posted about this before but I can expand on it now.

Breeding yeast is called brewing sourdough starter. You need at least a cup of rye flour or two cups of white wheat flour. Rye flour has more natural sugar in it and brews up quicker. You can use rye starter with wheat flour and get a good product, as well as going straight to rye and pumpernickel bread. I have never tried brewing starter with whole wheat flour but a post on the web says it works the same way as with white wheat flour.

You need a jar that will hold a quart of starter at least, and a warm place for it to brew in. You need room in your fridge to store the starter between batches -- if you have a "between batches".

Put 1/4 cup warm water and 1/4 cup flour in your jar, stir smooth, and let it sit uncovered 24 hours. If you are using rye flour, repeat this twice more and on the fourth day you should see bubbles of different sizes. With wheat flour, you will need to keep feeding the starter at least three more days before you see bubbles.

You now have one or two cups of starter. You need to test its health. Take half your starter and give the rest a feeding, then leave it out uncovered. If the test fails you need the rest of the starter to be warm so you can re-build.

We'll do the test with French bread which is simple even if it does take a couple of days. Take half a cup of starter, add half a cup of warm water and a cup of wheat flour, stir and let sit covered 8 hours in a warm place. Add the same amount of water and flour at the end of 8 hours and then once more, which sits overnight. This process is called building your sour.

In the morning, add two cups flour, mix thoroughly. This is your sponge; let it sit an hour. Now add at least two more cups flour plus 1 teaspoon salt, and knead into an elastic dough, adding more flour as it gets sticky. Slam it down on your kneading board once in a while. Put back in your bowl and let sit covered in a warm place at least an hour or until double. Do this once more. Then shape into your baguettes, cover with a damp cloth and sit in a warm place one hour or until double. Preheat oven to 425, bake 10 minutes, reduce heat to 375 and bake another 15 minutes. Turn the oven off, take the bread out, turn over and tap the bottom. It should sound hollow.  Put it in and close the oven and let it cool gradually.

If the bread didn't rise as much as you wanted, don't worry about it. You can slice the baguettes longwise for sandwiches or French bread pizza, or diagonally for tartines. If you have been feeding your starter daily in the  meantime, the next batch should work out better.

Personally, I prefer to make bread rolls than bread loaves. You can freeze the rolls and thaw them individually for sandwiches or as dippers for soup and stew; they make great mini-pizzas. So when you eat up the old test, do a new one but instead of making baguettes, divide your dough into 6 to 10 pieces, roll into balls, put on a cookie sheet, and flatten slightly. Cover and let sit in a warm place for an hour, then bake 15 minutes at 375. Turn the oven off and let them finish baking.

You can also make mini-baguettes for hot dog rolls.

You can also make pretzels with part of the dough. Cut about one third of the dough into six pieces. Roll between your hands into long ropes. Now make a pretzel shape with each rope. Glaze with mixed egg yolk and water, and sprinkle on a a little kosher salt. Put straight into a hot oven for 15 minutes, then turn the oven off. Voila, soft pretzels! By the time they are done, your rolls are risen and you can bake those.

Use the same glaze on the rolls and you can sprinkle them with sesame or poppy seeds; the glaze will hold the seeds on.

You can add two tablespoons of starter into any recipe for a heartier flavor: pancakes; english muffins; croissants.You can even make croissants with nothing but sourdough, just remember they'll come out less fluffy. They'll basically be hearty crescent rolls.

Now. I swear by George Greenstein's Jewish Baker book, but he does not have a recipe for 100% whole wheat sourdough bread. I worked out that it's just like any other 100% whole wheat bread, but you let the sponge brew 24 hours and you let your bread dough rise 24 hours.

This part is the care and feeding of sourdough starter. When you take out starter for a batch, immediately feed the rest. Give it a day to bubble, then put a lid on the jar and put it in the fridge. Next time you want to bake, take it out a day in advance to warm up, and feed it before baking. Make sure to feed it at least once a week. You can stretch that to two weeks; longer than two weeks and you may want to start over. Think of your starter as a pet that needs regular care -- it doesn't eat as often as a dog or cat, but it does need to eat.

One last tip. You can brew starter because the yeast that is naturally on the grain survives the milling process. Grain also has naturally occurring bacteria colonies. While you brew your starter, it will develop a SCOBY, Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast. It's a thick layer on the top. This in turn can breed mold. If your SCOBY gets fuzzy, scoop it off and throw it away.

Because of the bacteria, NEVER eat starter raw. In fact NEVER eat raw flour products of any kind. Cookie dough or pasta can be a double threat because they have eggs in them and eggs are known to carry salmonella. Always COOK FLOUR PRODUCTS BEFORE CONSUMING.

Here's how to make your baked stuff last longer: hardtack. As long as you let it cool completely, and keep it in an airtight container, hardtack will keep for years. And since modern flour doesn't start out with weevil eggs in it, you don't have to worry about weevils in the hardtack like those poor sailors had centuries ago. What you must do, however, is prick it thickly with a fork all over, or it will puff up when you bake it. And when you eat it you must soak it in something because it gets hard enough to break your teeth. There are hardtack recipes on the web; none of them use yeast so you don't even need any starter to make it.

Now, how about those huge flour orders. You get 8 bags, 5 lbs each, to a case. 5 lbs of flour makes two batches of bread. Challah is an exception; you get 4 loaves to a recipe so 1 batch per bag*. So a case of flour will last you however long 16 batches of bread or rolls will last you, or 8 Shabbats for challah. A bag of flour has a shelf life of two years as long as you keep it cool and dry; after that its ability to rise goes downhill until it's basically powdered cement. So if you, like a lot of people in my town, are learning to bake from scratch, not from the box, don't be afraid to buy giant economy size quantities of flour. You have two years to use it up, and you can use it to make pasta or egg noodles, as well as tons of different snacks.

And just because you buy whole wheat flour doesn't mean you're limited to bread. Look on the web; almost anything you would make with white flour, you can make with whole wheat.

Emergency organizations have been telling people for decades to build stashes for emergency situations. Nobody ever imagined that stores would run out of flour. Lots of things are going on today that nobody ever imagined. Don't just plan for "the worst"; plan for "the unimaginable."

* Our foremothers didn't have domesticated yeast until about 150 years ago. They bought their "yeast" (starter) from the rebbetsin, probably on Wednesday, hit the market Thursday to get flour with the rest of their Shabbat provisions, let their sponge develop overnight, and proofed and baked on Friday. The sugar in the recipe helps the bread rise, but you'll have to put up with loaves that are a little flatter than with domestic yeast. But it's way better than going without.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- all the agentless verbs you could ever want

I mentioned evidence of how the agentless forms play together.  Here it is: Exodus 21:29-31.

כט וְאִם שׁוֹר נַגָּח הוּא מִתְּמֹל שִׁלְשֹׁם וְהוּעַד בִּבְעָלָיו וְלֹא יִשְׁמְרֶנּוּ וְהֵמִית אִישׁ אוֹ אִשָּׁה הַשּׁוֹר יִסָּקֵל וְגַם־בְּעָלָיו יוּמָת:

ל אִם־כֹּפֶר יוּשַׁת עָלָיו וְנָתַן פִּדְיֹן נַפְשׁוֹ כְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר־יוּשַׁת עָלָיו:

לא אוֹ־בֵן יִגָּח אוֹ־בַת יִגָּח כַּמִּשְׁפָּט הַזֶּה יֵעָשֶׂה לּוֹ:

In verse 29, a dangerous ox kills somebody; the term huad is a hufal. It’s a legal definition of the ox’s status as “dangerous” because it gored two days in a row. The owner has been given notice of this status by an official source.

The owner doesn’t guard it properly, and it kills somebody so the ox is stoned. This is nifal. It’s the legal sentence imposed (presumably by an earthly court because this is not one of the sins listed in Mishnah Kritot 1:1) to prevent the ox from killing again.

The last word of the verse is yumat, another hufal definition. The owner is “a dead man” according to legal definition BUT this is not listed among the capital crimes so, since there’s no previous legislation that it’s a death penalty case, there’s no mot to go with the yumat.

In verse 30, we have yushat twice. This is qual and it is the imperfect aspect. Since the owner is now legally defined as a “dead man”, you might think he could be liable to the death penalty. In fact, counterintuitively, he is fined. The fine isn’t compensation for the death of whatever the ox gored. It’s redemption for the owner, comparable to paying restitution for a theft.

Verse 31 has the nifal yeaseh. This is another legal ruling. The fine is a dead end. The owner of the ox is not subject to capital punishment. The parents of the dead boy or girl cannot appeal to a court of 23 and get a death penalty, using the grounds that this was not an adult who was responsible for his or her own safety, but a child.

The only agentless binyan missing from this sequence is pual, which has two roles in law. One is that the situation falls short of being eligible for a court case, a less-than-hufal situation. The other is that there is more than one way to fall short of being eligible for a court case.

Knitting -- brioche increases and bind off

So last time I left you with a link to a handbook on brioche that shows increases and decreases.

https://www.interweave.com/mail-fulfillment/?rclp=https://s19256.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/brioche-stitch-knitting.pdf

But you know me, I like to see those fingers moving in a video, and the drawings weren't telling me much that helped me. So here are two videos.

This one is specifically for two-color brioche and shows the knit round increase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjEonr7MOWA

You slip the stitch as usual, then start the K2TOG as usual, but instead of taking the stitch off, you wrap your yarn again and go into the same place you just did a K2TOG. You go in from the front. This is different from plain knitting where you can do a KF/B increase if you don’t like m1 increases.

Then it shows what to do on your next round, a purl round. When you come to the triple stitch where the add is, you slip with a YO, purl the middle stitch that was added, then slip the third stitch again with a YO, and that gets you back the correct color sequence.

This is the same knitter’s video for decreases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9xeGB47XZY

Notice that she is working two-color in the round, not on the flat. I didn't go looking for videos for on the flat because I like knitting in the round so much.

When you do increases and decreases, you give up the reversibility of brioche. As Suzanne says, it doesn't become ugly. But if you are interested in brioche specifically because it's reversible, you need to find or create patterns that don't need increases or decreases. For example, you can make a jumper bottom up with a straight body, but then the sleeves will be the same width for their entire length. This is more like a jacket than a jumper. OTOH, the decreases in a jumper sleeve go next to the side "seams" and are not as visible as the increases in a raglan jumper.

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Now, how do you get out of your brioche? Let's go to the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywS6e56dvjk&list=PLLKJ9GuhEEwmWxUv-bPJi64wQfLWeeVP4&index=12

Get that? Now that's just how Suzanne does it, but it looks nice and neat and that's what you want, an attractive piece of work. Here's Suzanne's entire channel.
https://www.youtube.com/user/knittingSuzanne/playlists

So there's one more skill into the kit.

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.

Knitting -- brioche

This is one technique that is not covered in my ancient Encyclopedia of Needlework.

So the press on brioche stitch is that it’s high-loft and reversible. Nancy Marchant is the acknowledged expert and patterns often use her terminology. Her three books are Knitting Brioche and Knitting Fresh Brioche, and Knitting Brioche Lace. The conventional wisdom about brioche is, use a smaller needle than you usually do so, with fingering weight, use a size 2 instead of a size 3. 

The other thing, that I found out from this site is, you need 50% more yarn. So I can usually get a jumper out of 6 skeins of Palette, but I probably want 9 skeins for brioche.

http://knitbettersocks.blogspot.com/2012/01/brioche-fishermans-rib.html

The blogger also says don’t use modern wools like superwash or acrylic. You want hackling to keep the fabric from stretching all out of shape after the first wear/wash cycle. That means you don’t want to use cotton, linen, or silk either.

The site implies that brioche is a French term for what other knitting traditions call Fisherman’s Rib or Shaker Rib. It’s not. When you look at the descriptions on separate sites, they are different.

Some descriptions aren’t very good. They start out talking about a yarn over but then it starts to sound like the “funny double stitch” of a German short row. Here’s a video that shows that it really is a yarn over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYRwh6ec-88

Although the audio is softer than I like, it has the best demonstration (about minute 2:22) of how to do a brioche knit round. I made lots of mistakes because I was trying to do the K2TOG, bringing the yarn between the needle holding the two stitches and the previous purlwise slip. You have to take it around that slip stitch to create the YO that maintains your stitch count.

Then there’s two-color brioche. It's great for pieces worked in the round; if you are working on the flat you need the selvage shown in the other video and you have to slip the yarn back and forth.

For two-color brioche, written instructions in the Marchant terminology weren't enough for me; I needed to see those fingers moving. This video adds in the second color about minute 1:10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8De96grbEc

After that is where my problem with the brkyo started.

How to prevent problems.

1          Brioche needs a stitch count that is a multiple of 3. If you are going to do your normal rib at hem or sock cuff, of course you need multiples of 2 or 4. Choose a stitch count that is a multiple of both 3 and 4, and you’ll be fine when you switch over to brioche. If you don’t have multiples of 3, you will have odd stitches at the ends of rows (working in the flat) or your rounds won’t start in the same place every time, messing up your counts.

            On the other hand, one reason for a rib hem is to keep the bottom of your jumper or the top of your sock leg from curling. Brioche doesn’t have this problem. For a nice-looking start, cable your stitches on.

2.         If you are using DPs, such as for socks, be very careful at the end of the needle on a knit round with that last YO. It tends to drop off. If you get to the end of a needle on a purl round and you have a single stitch but no YO to knit TOG with it, you dropped the YO from the previous knit round. Find it (if you are working two-color it will be in the other color) and put it back up on your working needle, and then go on from there.

3.         Putting your work down. Whether it’s overnight or just while you pour the boiling water over your teabag (yuck, I use loose tea, especially after the plastic teabag row), you may come back and not know what to do next.

            a.         You are in the middle of a round. What is your next stitch? Look backward. If your 3-stitch sets have 2 in one color, that is the color to keep using.

            b.         Do you slip next or 2TOG next? If your last stitch was a slip, of course now you do a 2TOG.

            c.         You are at the end of a round. Look at the last two stitches you did. If one is the YO at the end of a knit round and the other is a slipped stitch, then you just finished a knit round and you start a purl round. If your last stitch is a TOG, it is a P2TOG and you start a knit round. And of course, check out which color dominates in the round you just finished and switch to the other color for the new round.

4.         Working two-color in the round, you need to wrap stitches at the end of a round. If you don't, you wind up with little holes. Sure, you can patch them shut, but in that case, why bother knitting in the round? So when you get ready to start a purl round, bring its dominant color over top of the YO at the end of the knit round, bring your purl color to the front, and work on. When you get to the start of a knit round, snug the purl color up hard, bring the knit color over top of it, and work on.

The thing I haven’t learned is how to fix a dropped stitch.

A lot of the brioche patterns out there are shawls and scarves, understandably because the loft makes them so warm. Here’s a very fancy one.

https://www.abc-knitting-patterns.com/1503.html

I started with socks. I worked my usual 48-stitch round. You can do a tube sock if you continue working in the round for the length of your leg and foot. Put a tape measure under your foot with the zero marker just before your toes, then run it down the sole of your foot and up the back of your leg to where you want the top of the sock to go. Then work an inch of brioche, count the number of rounds, and multiply by the inches the sock needs to be long for your foot. At the end, bind off one color and work a toe.

https://blog.shopmartingale.com/crochet-knitting/how-to-knit-tube-socks-go-brioche-giveaway/

Of course, it’s also easy to work toe-up and then just stop when it’s long enough.

If you want to work a heel, when you cast on, put ¼ of the stitches on needle 1, ½ of them on needle 2, and ¼ on needle three. Work 55 rounds in brioche ending with a knit round. Now drop one of the colors and turn your heel. As you go, catch in the color you are not using so that there’s not a floatie. This is like Carole Anderson’s heel-turning, but it binds off only 3 stitches per side to maintain your 3-count that you need for brioche.

On needle 1: K3, K2TOG, K1, turn, SL1, P4.

On needle 3: P3, P2TOG, P1, turn, SL1, K4.

Back on needle 1: K5, K2TOG, K1, turn, SL1, purl to end of needle.

On needle 3: P5, P2TOG, P1, turn, SL1, knit to end of needle.

Needle 1: K7, K2TOG, K1, turn, SL1, purl to end of needle.

Needle 3: P7, P2TOG, P1, purl to end of needle, turn, knit to end of needle.

There are now 9 stitches each on needles 1 and 3.

Now start again in brioche with a purl round, for 45 rounds and bind off one color. Work the toe in the other color using Carole Anderson’s wedge-toe method with the Kitchener stitch.

So here is my first brioche sock with a heel, a wedge toe, and all the warts on. The next one will go better, I'm sure of it.

If you are a fan of short rows, you may want to turn your heel in short rows. The difference is that the foot of the sock will be the same size as the leg and less snug than when you do 2TOGs. OTOH, that will let you put a sock liner under the sock. Brioche socks are already warmer than single-layer socks and so the liner idea may be great if you're out in sub-freezing temperatures a lot.

One of the things Marchant's book discusses is how to shape your work. Interweave has a free 21-page download that includes this information. This page will get it for you. Getting the download doesn't automatically sign you up for future emails, but there's a separate way to do that on the same page.

https://www.interweave.com/mail-fulfillment/?rclp=https://s19256.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/brioche-stitch-knitting.pdf

I came late to brioche because I was having so much fun with other things but I can see its benefits as well as its beauty, and that meant I had to include it on this blog.

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.

21st Century Hebrew Bible -- aspectless verbs 2

I have some cats and dogs to clean up on aspectless verbs and then I’ll move on to another topic.

I used Genesis 41:43 to discuss the relationship between the different aspects. Now let’s look at why it would be there.

וַיַּרְכֵּב אֹתוֹ בְּמִרְכֶּבֶת הַמִּשְׁנֶה אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ וַיִּקְרְאוּ לְפָנָיו אַבְרֵךְ וְנָתוֹן אֹתוֹ עַל כָּל־אֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם:

Let’s go through the alternatives and see why they don’t work.

If this had va-yiten, the narrative past, then we would still be enumerating how Pharaoh treated Yosef. Instead, we’re sealing off that list of examples.

If it had v’natan, that could be oblique modality, as if believing this clause depended on the truth of the other clauses. This isn’t a possible future action which the speaker is trying to convince the listener to believe in. It seals that as a result of the things done, we know that Pharaoh set Yosef over Egypt.  It’s also not part of the specifications for a ritual; if anything, the ritual is what the imperfect aspect verbs are about.

In Exodus 7:27 and 8:11, there are more aspectless verbs in similar situations. In the first one, we have im maen, for Pharaoh possibly refusing to let the Israelites go. It looks like the start of a duplicate conditional. However, the duplicate conditional would mean that there are conditions under which Pharaoh might not refuse and so far that hasn’t happened yet. We’re only up to the frogs and he refuses to let go until the firstborn die.

In 8:11 we have hakhbed. The verse opens with what looks like an evidentiary epistemic, which should have a narrative past after it as the evidence. However, this evidentiary epistemic is not asking for evidence; it comes after the verse about the stinking frogs, so it is actually a certainty epistemic. The next part of the verse says “because there was a respite”. Then we have Pharaoh hardening his heart, a beautifully gerundive use of this form, but if we used perfect aspect, we would be implying that he did so permanently and, according to the rest of the narrative, that wasn’t true. In this episode, Pharaoh hardening his heart is a job that a finite verb doesn’t work for, so it goes to the aspectless gerundive.