Lesson 8 | Original Language Tools
Grammar
The last part of Biblearc’s word box to cover is the top section. Here, we find the grammatical parsing of this occurrence of the word.
For those who have studied the original language, this information is incredibly helpful. Without such study, however, you will be mostly in the dark. Still, let me explain the parsing of “crowds” to give you a sample as to what parsing is all about.
The first word in the parsing is “dative.” This is the word’s case, something we do have in English. It relates to how the word is being used in the sentence and is the reason that “to” is highlighted along with “crowds.” That is, this single word is being translated to “to…crowds” and not just to “crowds.” The fact that one original language word is sometimes translated to more than one English word is an important concept to understand. And it works the other way as well—sometimes multiple original language words are translated to a single English word.
The next part of the parsing is “masculine.” As in many languages (but not English), all words in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek have a grammatical gender.
Finally, this word is parsed as “plural.” This grammatical detail typically works the same in English as it does in the original languages, indicating whether one or more are being spoken of.
In summary, original language grammar is mostly beyond you unless you take the time to fully learn the languages. But with that acknowledgment, both in the danger step of this lesson and again here, we can now say that there are a couple of common grammatical dynamics you are able to understand without knowing Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek.
One Common Grammatical Dynamic in Hebrew
Hebrew verbs use something called a stem in their parsing. This is an important element as it will usually change the meaning of the verb. In other words, the same Hebrew verb will mean one thing in one stem and another thing in another stem.
The parsing, in this example, comes in two parts. This is because Hebrew uses complex prefixes and suffixes that add on additional meaning. In this case, the orange first letter of the Hebrew word corresponds to the orange “if” in the ESV and the orange “interrogative” of the parsing.
The parsing we are concerned with, though, relates to “had subsided” and is in white. Since this word is a Hebrew verb, it has a stem. The stem is the first part of the parsing. In this case, it is qal. Again, since the stem affects the meaning, it is important to pay attention to this when looking at the lexical entry. (This word, after all, appears in all seven stems, each with a different meaning!) The meaning we are interested in is under the heading Qal. So Noah wanted to know if the waters were being made slight—that is, abating.
The big idea: When you are investigating the meaning of a verb in the Old Testament, take note of its stem.
One Common Grammatical Dynamic in Greek
On the other hand, in Greek, it is prepositions (i.e. words like in, on, above, before, etc) that can take on a different meaning based on their parsing. The parsing detail in play is called case. (Technically, it is the case of a preposition’s object, but we need not squabble about such things!)
In Luke 4:16, for example, Jesus went to the synagogue on the Sabbath “according to” his custom, not “against” his custom. We can see this from the accusative parsing and the simple case-specific definitions presented in the Biblearc’s Greek Prepositions lexicon. (Thayer’s also lists definitions of prepositions by case, but the length of the entries is harder to work with.) There is a “Biblearc’s Greek Prepositions” entry for each preposition that appears in multiple cases.
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Besides the stem of Hebrew verbs and the case of Greek prepositions, there are a few other original language grammar rules that can be learned without knowing the languages. Here are some books to check out if you are interested.
