Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- verbs starting with yod or nun

I said in the last lesson that there were five possibilities for a verb that had an alef first in future tense and seemed to have only two root letters, and one was a peh yod verb. The other is a peh  nun verb. 

 

Some verbs in these classes drop the first letter in future, and some don’t.  I don’t know of a general rule for you to go by for which roots do and which don’t.  Of course, if you can see that the verb has all three root letters, that’s easy to look up.  Some of the ones that drop the first letter are high-frequency; memorize them and you’ll cut down on your  dictionary time.

 

Here’s a very common peh yod verb, for births.  The qal (simple) binyan form means to give birth to, although the past tense can also mean to sire.  The present tense and past tenses are normal so I’ll leave those out.

 

Future/aorist

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֵלֵד	נֵלֵד	First
תֵּלֵד	תֵּלְדוּ	Second/masculine
תֵּלְדִי	תֵּלַדְנָה	Second/feminine
יֵלֵד	יֵלְדוּ	Third/masculine
תֵּלֵד	תֵּלַדְנָה	Third/feminine

 

So right away you see that the alef has to be the prefix, and since there’s no vav cholem, you suspect that it’s not a peh alef verb. 

 

eHere’s a fairly common peh nun verb in the future.  It means “to fall.”  Look at the difference.

 

Future/aorist

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶפּוֹל	נִיפּוֹל	First
תִּיפּוֹל	תִּיפְּלוּ	Second/masculine
תִּיפְּלִי	תִּיפּוֹלְנָה	Second/feminine
יִיפּוֹל	תִּיפְּלוּ	Third/masculine
תִּיפּוֹל	תִּיפוֹלְנָה	Third/feminine

 

That vav cholem in the first person, and the yod after the prefix in the others, is the dead giveaway of a peh nun verb. 

 

And what if they aren’t there and it’s written chaser?  Your choices are these.

 

First, peh yod and peh nun are a small subset of all of the Hebrew verbs, but some of them are very high frequency.  Examples are yod dalet ayin, “to know,” and nun tav nun, “to give.”  You ought to memorize those and that, as I said, will cut down on your dictionary time.

 

Second, if you didn’t memorize it, look under yod in the dictionary first, and then under nun.  That will slow you down the least.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Garden -- November

Read Mike McGrath's article.

A mass media publication recently said using leaves for compost was wrong.  They don't know Jack -- I mean, they don't know Mike!

Mike has always said not to leave whole leaves on your lawn.  He has always said to shred those leaves before leaving them on the lawn.

And oh yeah -- NO PRUNING NOW!  It's in the article.

As you can see from Mike's post, the people that charge you for yard work mostly don't know what they're doing --  but  they know you don't know either and that's how they get your money.

In Maryland the state has licensing programs for tree care experts.  Unfortunately, they don't know Jack either.

They do not tell licensees to keep mulch away from the tree trunks. 

They do not tell licensees not to prune in autumn.

So even if you go to the  trouble of checking for a state license number, you have to interview them to see if the people know what they're doing.

If you're in Maryland, go to the Extension Service website at University of Maryland.  Print it out and hold it in your hand during the interview, with a whopping big red pen in your hand.  Every time the "expert" says something that the printout contradicts, mark it.  Then show the guy why you're not going to hire him.  Here's the link.
https://extension.umd.edu/hgic/trees-and-shrubs/selection-purchasing-planting-and-care

However, now IS a good time to plant trees.  Again, make sure the guy has a license and print out  the extension service information which is here.
https://extension.umd.edu/hgic/trees-and-shrubs/planting-process

And again, here is a printout on tree care.
http://pubs.ext.vt.edu/426/426-724/426-724_pdf.pdf

Notice that the tree care PDF never discusses shredded hardwood mulch.  Never never never buy shredded hardwood mulch.  This PDF says why you should never use shredded hardwood mulch.
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/3000/3304.html

Yeah, I'm a bitch about stuff like this but I refuse to pay people to do things wrong.  Your only defense is to know how to do things right.  If you're rich enough  to light your barbecue with benjamins, you don't care about that.  Most of us do have to care.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the Ionians in Anatolia

I’m sure those Greek-reading clergymen noticed the similarity of Iapetos to Yefet.  What they may not have realized is that Ion is just another version of Yavan, a grandson of Yefet. 

Iapetos is listed in the Theogony of Hesiod, who wrote at the same time as “Homer” was developing the Iliad, the 600s BCE.  The Theogony ends where Enuma Elish has its middle – the battle of the gods.  In fact, Greek myth has two battles of the gods, the Titans against Uranos with Mother Earth’s help, and the Olympians against the Titans.

Hesiod’s father arrived in Greece from the Ionian city of Cyme on the west shores of Anatolia.   Cyme was founded by people from Locris.  Locris is a place in Greece described (in Roman Emperor Hadrian’s time) by Pausanias as the origin of wine-growing in Greek-speaking regions, and Pausanias identifies the first man to grow wine grapes as the son of Deucalion.

Now notice where Noach was when he started growing wine grapes.  In Anatolia.  In the Lake Van region.  Archaeology shows that wine grapes were domesticated in this region.  It happened about 4000 BCE. 

I told you to remember that date.  It’s almost in the middle of the period when proto-Semitic was developing.  It’s the same period when Anatolians were messing with meteoric iron. 

The Iliad uses the word sideros for “iron”; sideros is related to Greek for “star”, suggesting that originally the Greek language mostly knew of meteoric or star-generated iron.  However, the text of the Iliad seems to identify two other types of iron in use.  One is the “bloom” that settles out of smelting when ores contain iron as well as the copper wanted for bronze.  The other is “gleaming” iron which might refer to carbon steel.  (Remember, carbon steel developed by 1500 BCE and appeared in the Holy Land by 1000 BCE.)  The Iliad describes arrowheads as being iron.  These three points of information might seem to be later additions adopted for audiences who could not imagine weapons of war made of anything besides iron, but Agamemnon is accused of greed even though his huts are full of bronze and the Achaeans are described as “bronze-greaved.” 

The Iliad is not a story of Bronze Age people.  It is the story of a people on the crossroads using and valuing both bronze and iron.

Or peoples.  The people who destroyed Wilusa by 1160 BCE came from a loose association lumped together as the Sea Peoples based on their description and enumeration on an inscription of Ramses III at Medinat Habu, erected some time after 1175 BCE when (he claimed) he defeated them.  The components, who fought alongside Libyans, were: Ekwesh (part of a puzzle I will discuss later); Pelishtim (the Pleti of King David’s bodyguard, along with the Creti or Cretans); Teresh (ancestors of the Etruscans); Sikila or Shekelesh and Sherden (ancestors of the Phoenicians who founded Sicilian and Sardinian colonies); Weshesh (ancestors of the Oscians); Lukka (Lycians of Anatolia); and Denyen (Danaans). 

The Sea Peoples destroyed Wilusa, then moved inland and destroyed the Hittite capital of Hattusas, and then to the coast and destroyed Ugarit, all within a 40 year period.  The Denyen and Ionians had traditions which were Anatolian in origin, including the wars of the gods referred to in Theogony and later Greek material.  I’ll give more information about this Anatolian connection later.

Oh, just one more urban legend, pleeeze!  I think you will find in most books on the subject that the Sea Peoples are described as Bronze Age.  From the dates and previous posts, you know that by this time, steel was in use throughout southwestern Asia.  So Bronze Age is a hangover (urp!) from old archaeology books.  Scrub your brain and come into the 21^st century, OK?

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- verbs starting with alef

All right, let’s deal with some verbs that have peh alef.  One reason for starting here is not just that alef is the first letter in the alphabet, but also that it has one extremely common verb, alef mem resh, “say.”   This is the qal or plain simple binyan.

 

Present

Singular	Plural	Gender
אוֹמֵר	אוֹמְרים	Masculine
אוֹמֶרֶת	אוֹמְרוֹת	Feminine

Past

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אָמַרְתִּי	אָמַרְנוּ	First
אָמַרְתָּ	אֲמַרְתֶּם	Second/masculine
אָמַרְתְּ	אֲמַרְתֶּן	Second/feminine
אָמַר	אָמְרוּ	Third/masculine
אָמְרָה	אָמְרוּ	Third/feminine

Future/aorist

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אוֹמַר	נֹאמַר	First
תֹּאמַר	תֹּאמְרוּ	Second/masculine
תֹּאמְרִי	תֹּאמַרְנָה	Second/feminine
יֹאמַר	יֹאמְרוּ	Third/masculine
תֹּאמַר	תֹּאמַרְנָה	Third/feminine

 

Now, first, with a weak letter, usually it disappears in the “future” first person singular.  But we still have an alef here in first person singular.  What’s going on?

 

That alef is the sign of the “future” form.  What normally happens is that in the future tense, the alef is followed by the first verb root letter with a shva under it.  But you can’t use shva under alef.  That only works when the letter has a sound of its own, and alef doesn’t.

 

When you have a form that starts with alef like a normal future tense, but it only has two more root letters, you have five possibilities.  You have a peh alef, a peh yod, a peh nun, an ayin yod, or an ayin vav.  How do you eliminate any of them before you use the dictionary? 

 

The first clue is that vav with the cholem on top.  Or just the vav if there are no vowel markers.  That is the sign of a peh alef verb.  It might be omer, “present” or it might be omar, “future”, but it’s none of the other possibilities. 

 

However, as you know from past discussions, it’s possible to drop vav as part of a conjugated verb.  Then you have either omer, omar, amar (“past”), or emor, imperative.  At that point all you know is you look it up in the alefs, and then you use context to figure out which of the four you have.  But the sample verb here you should learn by heart because it’s extremely common in Torah and memorizing it will save you a lot of dictionary time.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the Ionian flood story

Clergymen used to have to study Greek and Latin in college so that they could read primary documents of Christianity.  They might also read Pindar, Apollonius Rhodius, Pausanias, Pseudo-Apollodorus, and Ovid (in Latin), all of whom say something about a flood.  The only one of these that has a complete flood story is Ovid.

The provenance of Ovid is 8 CE; the story is in his Metamorphoses.  Pindar wrote in the 400s BCE; Apollonius in the 300s; Pausanias in the 100s CE, and the same for Pseudo-Apollodorus.  Pindar implies that Deucalion and Pyrrha were the only survivors of the flood, by saying that they started a new human race which arose from stones.  Pausanias refers to the flood when describing Attica.

We don’t know where Ovid got his story.  We don’t know how much of it reflects a story handed down from antiquity and how much he invented.  What we do know is that all of these references come two millennia after the Shuruppak flood and over a millennium after the twelve-tablet version of Gilgamesh.

Until the discovery of Gilgamesh in 1932 and its translation in 1936, westerners might marvel that two cultures, seemingly so different as Judaism and Hellenism, and so often at odds in their histories, would both have a flood story.  The discovery of Gilgamesh seemed to support ideas popular at the time, that all culture disperses from a center, but the center seemed to be Mesopotamia, a revolutionary idea, because up to then all the men at the universities thought Greece was the font of culture. 

What the scholars of Gilgamesh ignored, however, is that each of the stories had its own localized landing site: Omar Gudrun in the Zagros for Utnapishtim and a mountain in Anatolia for Noach.  Greek stories give various places as the landing site for Deucalion and Pyrrha: Mount Parnassus above the shrine of Delphi, sacred to Apollo; Mount Etna in Sicily; Mount Athos in Chalkidiki in the northeast of modern Greece and just across the Aegean sea from Wilusa; and Mount Othrys in Thessaly, slightly southwest of Chalkidiki.  Mount Othrys was traditionally the site of the battle of the gods recorded in Hesiod’s Theogony.  Parnassus is south of Thessaly and was also sacred to Dionysius.

Deucalion was grandson of the Titan Iapetos.  Deucalion’s grandson was Ion, eponymous ancestor of the Ionians, who lived in Achaia in the Peloponnese for a while, and then by the 800s BCE migrated to the west coast of Anatolia, south of Wilusa, where the Iliad developed in an Ionian dialect.  The Iliad says Hector attacked Iaones while fighting among the Achaian camp (Book XIII, line 686); the context differentiates them from Locrians and Boeotians. 

The Ionians are mentioned in a Linear B tablet in Mykenae from the 1400s BCE as Iawones.  And remember that Agamemnon, one leader of the Achaean forces against Troy, came from Mykenae while his colleague, Diomedes, was Cretan.

Iapetos has one more association with Anatolia besides his mythological relationship to the Ionians.  That’s for next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew -- strong verbs

We’re going to start with a verb I already conjugated for you.  It doesn’t belong to any of the three classes I named last time.  It is said to have “strong” root letters and it will contrast with verbs that have “weak” root letters which I will discuss soon enough.

 

Present

Singular	Plural	Gender
מֹשֵל	מֹשְלִים	Masculine
מֹשֶׁלֶת	מֹשְׁלוֹת	Feminine

 

Past

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
מָשַׁלְתִּי	מָשַׁלְנוּ	First
מָשַׁלְתָּ	מְשַלְתֶּם	Second/masculine
מָשַׁלְתְּ	מְשַלְתֶּן	Second/feminine
מָשַׁל	מָשְׁלוּ	Third/masculine
מָשְׁלָה	מָשְׁלוּ	Third/feminine

 

Future/aorist

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶמְשֹׁל	נִמְשֹׁל	First
תִּמְשֹׁל	תִּמְשְׁלוּ	Second/masculine
תִּמְשְׁלִי	תִּמְשֹׁלְנָה	Second/feminine
יִמְשֹׁל	יִמְשְׁלוּ	Third/masculine
תִּמְשֹׁל	תִּמְשֹׁלְנָה	Third/feminine

 

First, the roots of this verb are mem shin lamed.  They are present in every tense.  That is what makes this a strong verb.  Verbs with “weak” letters may lose them in conjugation. 

 

Second, notice that the “past” has no prefixes.  That suggests that this is the qal or binyan.  For purposes of looking in a dictionary, when you have a strong letter as the first root letter, you look under that in the dictionary.

 

So if you had a root of qof tet lamed, you would look under qof.

 

Now notice that the “future/aorist” has prefixes before the mem.  They will often appear with a vav at the start, for reasons I’ll discuss later.  But you see here all three root letters expressed after a prefix which shows person, number and gender. 

 

Notice the prefixes alef, nun, and yod.  Those are the ones we have to address when we have verbs with weak roots in this tense. 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved