Lesson 10 | Cantillation
[3] Verbless Clauses
At this point in your Hebrew journey, you’ve encountered many verbless clauses—clauses where the verb in Hebrew is assumed. But we haven’t yet picked up a magnifying glass to peer intently at them. Let’s do that now.
There are two types of verbless clauses.
An Implied Repeated Verb
First, a verb that occurs in one clause can safely be omitted from the second clause, since its presence will be understood.
The verb שַׁחוּ, and the English “bow down,” can easily be supplied in the reader’s mind when reading the second clause: “and [the] wicked [bow down] at [the] gates of the righteous.”
An Implied Stative Verb
Secondly, a stative verb is regularly just assumed. You know this is the case when you find a subject and predicate adjective/nominative without a verb, as in the last clause of this verse:
Other times, you will find a third-person masculine pronoun instead of a verb. You translated Jeremiah 31:9 back in Lesson 4. Take a look again at the last three words, after the perfect verb and the last zaqeph qaton:
Your final translation of וְאֶפְרַ֖יִם בְּכֹ֥רִי הֽוּא shouldn’t be “and Ephraim my firstborn he,” but hopefully that serves as a beginning to help you understand it. There is a similar construction in the common English translation of Martin Luther’s hymn “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”):
A mighty fortress is our God,
a bulwark never failing;
our helper he,
amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.
So think of that line when you read a Hebrew verbless clause with הוּא! “Our helper he.” Thus to translate the line from Jeremiah 31:9 properly, you simply insert a stative verb: “Ephraim [is] my firstborn.”