How Hebrew Tells a Story

If you have taken the Hermeneutics track, you have already met Hebrew narrative as a genre in the lesson called Narrative: the reticent narrator, Erich Auerbach's phrase about stories 'fraught with background', report that is not approval, and the trap Nathan springs on David in 2 Samuel 12. If you have not taken it, read that lesson before this one, because this module does not repeat it. The Old Testament Survey track covers what happens in the stories. This module does something narrower and more practical. It takes the techniques those lessons describe and shows you where they sit in the Hebrew itself, so that with a free interlinear on a phone you can see them for yourself rather than taking a commentator's word for them.

You already have the main tool. In Module 4 you met the narrative chain, the verb form grammarians call the wayyiqtol: a vav joined to the front of a prefix verb, וַיֹּאמֶר (vayyomer), and he said, וַיֵּלֶךְ (vayyelekh), and he went. You also met the debates about what the form is and how it came to be. This lesson does not reopen those debates. It asks a reader's question instead: what does a storyteller do with a language whose main line of action is carried by one verb form repeated, sometimes dozens of times in a row?

Five lessons follow, and each adds one page to your notebook. This one teaches you to see the narrator's choices: the chain, the pause, the scarce description and the point of view. The second follows repeated words, the third listens to speech, the fourth looks at what the text leaves out, and the fifth puts the four together on Ruth 1. Every page is meant for the capstone at the end of the track, where you will study an Old Testament passage of your own choosing with every skill the track has taught.

A word about the scholars you will meet. The modern study of biblical narrative as an art owes most to a handful of literary readers writing from the late 1960s on: Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, Adele Berlin, Shimon Bar-Efrat and J. P. Fokkelman among them. They have taught a generation of preachers to slow down. They also have serious critics, who say that the literary approach can import the habits of the modern novel into ancient texts and can pass over history and theology. Lessons 3 and 4 give those critics their due. For now, take their observations as things to check in the Hebrew, not as conclusions to adopt.

Open 1 Samuel 3:1-10 in the Hebrew of the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), the medieval manuscript that underlies the free interlinears, and count the narrative verbs. The free Open Scriptures morphology of the WLC, which several tools draw on, tags twenty-five wayyiqtol forms in those ten verses, out of roughly 145 Hebrew words. That is the chain. Samuel runs, says, goes, lies down; the LORD calls again; Samuel gets up, goes, says. Each new wayyiqtol pushes the clock forward by one event, and the reader is carried along without being told what anyone feels.

Then look at where the chain stops. Verse 1 does not begin with a wayyiqtol at all. It begins וְהַנַּעַר שְׁמוּאֵל (vehanna'ar Shmu'el), and the boy Samuel, followed by a participle, מְשָׁרֵת (mesharet), ministering. A clause that puts a noun first, joined by vav, and then uses a participle or a perfect rather than a wayyiqtol, is what grammars call a disjunctive clause. It steps off the chain. It does not tell you what happened next; it tells you what was already true while things happened. Verse 1 goes on: וּדְבַר־יְהוָה הָיָה יָקָר (udevar-YHWH hayah yaqar), and the word of the LORD was rare. Noun first, perfect verb, background.

Verses 2 and 3 do the same thing three more times. Eli is lying in his place, his eyes have begun to grow dim, the lamp of God has not yet gone out, Samuel is lying in the temple where the ark of God is. Then verse 4 starts the chain again: וַיִּקְרָא יְהוָה אֶל־שְׁמוּאֵל (vayyiqra YHWH el-Shmu'el), and the LORD called to Samuel. You can see the shape on the page of an interlinear without knowing much grammar at all. Where the vav-prefixed verbs come thick and fast, the story is moving. Where a verse opens with a name or a noun, the narrator has stopped to show you the stage.

The most important pause in the chapter is verse 7, and it is worth reading in Hebrew: וּשְׁמוּאֵל טֶרֶם יָדַע אֶת־יְהוָה (uShmu'el terem yada et-YHWH), and Samuel did not yet know the LORD. Again, noun first, then טֶרֶם (terem), not yet, then the verb. The narrator interrupts the second and third calls to tell the reader something the boy himself does not know: that the voice in the night is not Eli's, and why Samuel cannot recognise it. From verse 7 on, you are watching a scene in which you know more than the main character. That gap between what the reader knows and what a character knows is one of the narrator's chief tools, and you will meet it again in Lesson 4.

Be careful not to make this a mechanical rule. Hebrew prose has other ways to mark background, and textlinguists such as Robert Longacre and Alviero Niccacci, who did much to describe the mainline and background in Hebrew prose, did not agree on every detail. Not every noun-first clause is background; some mark a contrast between two characters, as you will see in Ruth 1:14 in Lesson 5. But as a first reading habit it is reliable and it costs nothing. Before you ask what a verse means, ask whether it is moving the story or holding it still.

In those same ten verses of 1 Samuel 3, the morphology tags exactly two adjectives that describe anything: יָקָר (yaqar), rare, of the word of the LORD in verse 1, and כֵהוֹת (khehot), dim, of Eli's eyes in verse 2. Add one ordinal number, the third time, in verse 8, and that is all. There is no description of the temple, of the night, of Samuel's face, or of what the LORD looked like when he came and stood. A modern novelist would spend a page on the scene. The Hebrew narrator spends two adjectives, and both of them are about the failure of sight and word at Shiloh.

That is the principle to carry into every narrative you read: physical description is rare, and when it comes it nearly always matters to what happens next. Eli's dim eyes matter because the chapter is about who can see and hear the LORD, and the lamp of God that has not yet gone out (3:3) gives you the hour of the night and, many readers think, something more, though the narrator never says so. Genesis 39:6 tells you that Joseph was יְפֵה־תֹאַר וִיפֵה מַרְאֶה (yefeh-to'ar vifeh mar'eh), handsome in form and handsome in appearance. It is the only physical description of Joseph in the chapter, and it comes one verse before his master's wife lifts her eyes to him. The same phrase, in its feminine form, was used of his mother Rachel in Genesis 29:17. The narrator has placed it with care.

Genesis 29:17 also shows you what one adjective can do. Leah's eyes are רַכּוֹת (rakkot). The BSB says 'Leah had weak eyes'; the King James Version, which is public domain, says 'Leah was tender eyed'. The Hebrew word is used elsewhere of what is soft, tender or delicate, and readers disagree about whether the narrator is paying Leah a small compliment beside her sister's beauty or naming a defect. Look it up in the Blue Letter Bible lexicon and you will see the range. The point for now is not to settle it. It is that a narrator who allows himself so few descriptive words has given the reader a puzzle with one of them, and has done it in the verse that sets up the whole story of Jacob's marriages.

The same economy governs names and labels. A Hebrew narrator will repeat a name where English would use he, and will attach a label at the moment it matters: Uriah the Hittite, Ruth the Moabitess, the boy Samuel. Notice that in 1 Samuel 3:1 Samuel is הַנַּעַר (hanna'ar), the boy, and in 3:8 Eli finally understands that the LORD is calling לַנָּעַר (lanna'ar), the boy. The narrator does not tell you to feel the distance between an old priest who cannot see and a child the LORD has chosen. He lets the labels do it.

None of this means the narrator is cold. The restraint is what gives the rare evaluative or descriptive word its force, as the Hermeneutics lesson showed with the last clause of 2 Samuel 11. A preacher who wants to honour that restraint does not have to stop describing scenes. But he should know which details are in the text and which he has supplied, and he should never present the second kind as the first.

The Hebrew narrator knows everything, including what God is doing and what characters are thinking. He usually chooses not to say. But he can narrow his view to what one character sees or knows, and when he does the reader is drawn into that character's experience. Adele Berlin, in Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (1983), and Shimon Bar-Efrat, in Narrative Art in the Bible (Hebrew 1979, English 1989), both give this point of view a central place, and it is one of the easiest techniques to see in an interlinear because a single small word often marks it.

That word is הִנֵּה (hinneh), traditionally rendered behold. In speech it means look, or here is. In narration, especially after a verb of seeing, it often signals that what follows is seen through a character's eyes. Genesis 29:25 is the classic case: וַיְהִי בַבֹּקֶר וְהִנֵּה (vayhi vabboqer vehinneh), and it was morning, and look, it was Leah. The narrator could have written that Laban had given Jacob the wrong daughter. Instead he lets you wake up beside Jacob. In Genesis 22:13 Abraham lifts his eyes and looks, וְהִנֵּה־אַיִל (vehinneh-ayil), and look, a ram. You see the ram at the moment Abraham sees it, and not before. The BSB renders the first 'there was Leah!' and folds the second into 'saw behind him a ram', which are both fair English and both hide the word, which is exactly why you check the Hebrew.

Point of view can also be marked without hinneh, by a verb that opens a character's mind. In 1 Samuel 3:8, after the third call, the narrator writes וַיָּבֶן עֵלִי (vayyaven Eli), and Eli understood, that it was the LORD calling the boy. For one clause you are inside the old priest's head, watching him realise what has been happening in his own temple. And the reader's position in the chapter is set by 3:7: you know before Eli does, and long before Samuel does, who is calling. A good narrator moves his reader's knowledge ahead of a character's, level with it, or behind it, on purpose. Asking at each point what the reader knows that the character does not is one of the most useful questions in this module.

A practical note on the tools. Free interlinears give each Hebrew word a Strong's number, and you will often want to search for every hinneh in a passage. But Hebrew has a shorter word of the same family, הֵן (hen), and the forms with a suffix, such as הִנֵּנִי (hinneni), here I am, can be filed under either. The Open Scriptures morphology I checked files hinneni under one number in 1 Samuel 3 and under the other in Genesis 22. Search both, H2005 and H2009, before you conclude that a word is absent, and treat any count you make as something to check rather than something to announce from the pulpit.

Now read the anchor verse in Hebrew, piece by piece. וַיָּבֹא יְהוָה וַיִּתְיַצַּב (vayyavo YHWH vayyityatsav), and the LORD came and took his stand. The second verb is hithpael, the stem you met in Module 4, here with the sense of stationing oneself. Three times the LORD has called from somewhere unseen. Now the narrator says he came and stood. It is a striking thing to say, and the narrator says nothing more about it: no description, no light, no form. In 3:15 the experience is called הַמַּרְאָה (hammar'ah), the vision, so Samuel saw something. The text will not tell you what, and a faithful reader does not fill it in.

Then וַיִּקְרָא כְפַעַם־בְּפַעַם (vayyiqra khefa'am-befa'am), and he called as at the other times, and the name doubled: שְׁמוּאֵל שְׁמוּאֵל (Shmu'el Shmu'el). The doubled call is rare and it gathers weight from its company. The angel of the LORD calls 'Abraham, Abraham!' in Genesis 22:11 at the moment the knife is raised. God calls 'Jacob, Jacob!' in Genesis 46:2 before Jacob goes down into Egypt. God calls 'Moses, Moses!' from the bush in Exodus 3:4. Each is a turning point, and in each the one called answers הִנֵּנִי (hinneni), here I am. Samuel has said hinneni four times already in this chapter, three of them to the wrong person. This time he does not say it.

What he says instead is דַּבֵּר כִּי שֹׁמֵעַ עַבְדֶּךָ (dabber ki shomea avdekha): speak, for your servant is listening. דַּבֵּר (dabber) is a piel imperative, speak. שֹׁמֵעַ (shomea) is a qal participle of shama, to hear or listen, describing an ongoing state: your servant is a listener, now. Compare that with what Eli told him in 3:9: דַּבֵּר יְהוָה כִּי שֹׁמֵעַ עַבְדֶּךָ (dabber YHWH ki shomea avdekha). One word is missing from Samuel's reply, and it is the name of the LORD.

Here is the narrator's reticence in a single verse, and it is a good place to practise what Lesson 4 will teach. The text does not say why the name is missing. You can line up readings: that Samuel did not yet know the LORD (3:7) and so did not presume to use his name; that he was overawed; that he was not certain who was speaking; or that the narrator is shortening a line the reader has just heard in full. Each has some support and none is stated. A preacher can raise the question, and can say which reading he finds most likely and why. What he cannot do is announce that 'Samuel left out the name because he was afraid' as though the narrator had said it.

Notice finally how the chapter ends its story of Samuel's call, in 3:19: וַיהוָה הָיָה עִמּוֹ (vaYHWH hayah immo), and the LORD was with him. Noun first, perfect verb: the narrator has stepped off the chain to sum up. Hold on to that phrase. The next lesson begins with almost the same words said of Joseph in Genesis 39:2, and follows what a narrator does when he repeats them.

Your step this week: choose a narrative for your notebook. If your capstone passage is a story, use it. If it is a psalm, a law or a prophecy, choose the story nearest to it in the same book, or the story it depends on (for Psalm 51, 2 Samuel 11 and 12), because almost every passage in the Old Testament sits inside or beside a story. On a page headed Narrator, open the passage in the interlinear on your phone and copy the first word of each verse in transliteration. Mark each verse M if it opens with a wayyiqtol and moves the story, or B if it opens with a noun or name and holds it still. Underline every adjective the tool tags, and circle every hinneh, searching both Strong's numbers. At the bottom, write one sentence on where the narrator has paused and one on whose eyes you are looking through. The next four lessons add pages beside this one.