The Three-Letter Root

If you have worked through the earlier modules of this track, you can already sound out a Hebrew word and find it in an interlinear. This module turns to the verb, the part of Hebrew that carries most of its meaning and most of its difficulty, and it begins with the one idea that unlocks the rest: the root. Nearly every Hebrew verb, and a great many nouns and adjectives, is built on a root of three consonants. The root is a skeleton. Vowels, prefixes and suffixes are put on it to make actual words, and each pattern of vowels and additions does a particular job.

Take the root מלך (m-l-k). In Psalm 93:1 the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), the Hebrew text behind every modern Old Testament, reads יְהוָה מָלָךְ (YHWH malakh, the LORD reigns). מָלָךְ (malakh) is the verb: qal perfect, third person masculine singular, he reigns or he has become king. From the same three letters come מֶלֶךְ (melekh, king), מַלְכוּת (malkhut, kingship or reign) and מַמְלָכָה (mamlakah, kingdom). The consonants m, l and k run through them all; the vowels and the extra letters tell you which word you are looking at. English has a faint version of this in sing, sang, sung and song, but in Hebrew it is the normal way the language is built.

This matters for you for a practical reason. The great public-domain lexicon you met in module 2, Brown, Driver and Briggs (1906), is arranged by root, not by spelling, so to find a word in it you need to know its root. Strong's numbers, which Blue Letter Bible and STEP Bible both use, are arranged by dictionary form instead, and the tools do the finding for you when you tap a word. But when a tool tells you that a word is from such-and-such a root, or when two words in a passage look related, you need to know what that means and what it does not.

You can usually find the root of a verb yourself by taking off what has been added. In the perfect, the additions come at the end: תִּי (-ti) for I, תָּ (-ta) for you, masculine singular, נוּ (-nu) for we, וּ (-u) for they. In the imperfect, the person is shown mainly by a prefix: א (aleph) for I, ת (tav) for you or she, י (yod) for he or they, נ (nun) for we. So שָׁמַרְתִּי (shamarti, I kept) is the root שׁמר (sh-m-r, keep or guard) with -ti on the end, and יִשְׁמֹר (yishmor, he will keep) is the same root with yi- on the front. A vav on the very front, וְ or וַ, is usually the word and, and comes off too.

Then there are the weak roots, and you need to know they exist so that they do not throw you. Some letters, especially aleph, he, vav, yod and nun, tend to drop out, change, or merge with a vowel when they sit in certain places in a root. The root of our anchor verse is one of these. הָיָה (hayah, to be, to become, to happen) ends in he, and in many forms the final he becomes a vowel or disappears. So the forms הָיָה (hayah, he was), יִהְיֶה (yihyeh, he will be), וַיְהִי (wayhi, and it was) and אֶהְיֶה (ehyeh, I will be, or I am) all come from one root, even though the last one shows only two of its letters in any obvious way. When a word puzzles you, the tool's lexical form, the word it lists as the dictionary entry, is the quickest way to see which root you are dealing with.

Once students discover roots, a temptation follows almost at once. If melekh and mamlakah share a root, and the root means reign, then surely every word from that root carries the root's meaning, and you can explain a word by its root. Sometimes that is roughly true. Often it is not, and the habit of assuming it is called the root fallacy. James Barr exposed it in The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961), with examples drawn from sermons and theological dictionaries of his day, and his point has been accepted by lexicographers ever since: a word means what its users meant by it, and that is learned from how it is used, not from where it came from.

Here is a version you will hear. The Hebrew word for wilderness is מִדְבָּר (midbar), and the common word for word is דָּבָר (davar). They share the consonants d, b and r. So, the sermon goes, the wilderness is the place of the word, where God speaks. It is a lovely thought, and the Bible does show God speaking in the wilderness, at Sinai above all. But the shared letters do not prove it. Many lexicographers think midbar comes from a different root, or from a different sense of the letters connected with driving flocks out to pasture, and even if the two words were related a thousand years before Moses, no Israelite heard the word for wilderness and thought of speech. If you want to preach that God speaks in the wilderness, preach it from Exodus 19 and Hosea 2:14, where the text says so, not from the spelling.

The same caution applies in reverse. Two words can have nothing to do with each other in meaning and still look alike, and two words can mean nearly the same thing and have different roots. The root is a fact about how a word is built. It is evidence about meaning, sometimes good evidence, but it is not the meaning. Module 2's lesson on Hebrew myths and the Koine Greek lesson What the Tools Cannot Do give more examples of the trap; it is the same trap in both languages.

There is one place where roots really do carry weight, and you should not lose it in avoiding the fallacy. Hebrew writers love to play on sounds and roots, and when the text itself makes the play, you are not reading it in. Genesis 2:7 forms אָדָם (adam, man) from the אֲדָמָה (adamah, ground). And Exodus 3 makes a play between a verb and a name, as you are about to see. The rule is simple: a root connection is worth preaching when the writer has drawn attention to it, and it is a fallacy when the preacher supplies it.

Now the anchor. In the WLC, Exodus 3:14 begins וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים אֶל מֹשֶׁה (wayyomer elohim el mosheh, and God said to Moses), and God's answer is three words: אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (ehyeh asher ehyeh). Ehyeh is parsed in every standard tool as qal imperfect, first person common singular, from hayah. Qal is the basic stem, the subject of the next lesson. Imperfect is one of the two main conjugations, and lesson 4 will show that what it signals is itself disputed: it is used for future action, for repeated or habitual action, for general truths, for what may or should happen, and sometimes for present states. אֲשֶׁר (asher) is the ordinary relative word, who, which or that. So the most literal thing one can say is: I will be (or I am) who (or what) I will be (or am).

Then the verse continues: כֹּה תֹאמַר לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶהְיֶה שְׁלָחַנִי אֲלֵיכֶם (koh tomar livne yisrael, ehyeh shelachani alekhem, thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, Ehyeh has sent me to you). Here ehyeh, a verb, is used as a name, the subject of another verb, שְׁלָחַנִי (shelachani, he has sent me), a qal perfect third person masculine singular of שָׁלַח (shalach, to send) with the suffix me. And in verse 15 God says the same sentence again with a different subject: יהוה, the four letters of the divine name, has sent me to you, and adds זֶה שְּׁמִי לְעֹלָם (zeh shemi le-olam, this is my name forever). The narrator has set the first-person ehyeh and the third-person name YHWH in the same slot of the same sentence, one verse apart. Whatever the history of the name, the text presents YHWH as the name that answers to ehyeh.

Several things, then, are settled, and you can teach them with confidence. The verb is hayah, to be. The form is first person: God speaks of himself. The same form has just been used two verses earlier, in 3:12, where God answers Moses' 'Who am I?' with כִּי אֶהְיֶה עִמָּךְ (ki ehyeh immakh, for I will be with you, rendered by the BSB as 'I will surely be with you'). And the name YHWH is presented in its context as connected to that verb. What is not settled is the sense of the imperfect here and the force of the repeated verb with asher between. That is where serious readers divide, and they divide with real evidence on every side.

One more piece of evidence belongs on the table before the readings. The shape verb, asher, same verb is not unique to this verse. In Exodus 33:19 God tells Moses וְחַנֹּתִי אֶת אֲשֶׁר אָחֹן (we-channoti et asher achon, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious), which the BSB renders 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy', and then the same with the verb for compassion. Grammarians sometimes call this construction idem per idem, the same by the same. It leaves the second half open: it does not say whom, it says that God decides. Notice, too, that the BSB has rendered the second imperfect in 33:19 as an English present, 'whom I have mercy', which shows how freely the imperfect can be rendered into English time.

The Old Testament Survey lesson The Name introduces four readings of this verse. Here they are again, this time with the Hebrew evidence each one rests on, so that you can weigh them yourself. Each is held by careful readers who know the grammar, and they are not all mutually exclusive.

The first is the reading of being. When Jewish translators rendered the Torah into Greek in the third century before Christ, they put ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν (egō eimi ho ōn, I am the one who is), and the Latin Vulgate has ego sum qui sum, I am who I am. The KJV, public domain, followed: 'I AM THAT I AM'. On this reading God names himself as the one who simply is, who depends on nothing and no one. Thomas Aquinas asked in his Summa Theologiae (part 1, question 13, article 11) whether HE WHO IS is the most proper name of God, and answered yes, because it signifies being itself; Augustine before him had built on the same text. Its defenders point out that the imperfect of hayah can describe a present state: in Isaiah 3:7 a man says lo ehyeh chovesh, which the BSB renders 'I am not a healer', and in Job 12:4 Job says he is a laughingstock with the same verb form. They add that the New Testament seems to hear the verse this way. Revelation 1:8 speaks of the Lord God 'who is and was and is to come', and many interpreters hear Exodus 3:14 behind Jesus' words in John 8:58, 'before Abraham was born, I am!', though others trace that saying to the 'I am He' sayings of Isaiah instead. The theology here is the classical doctrine of God's self-existence, and it is not an invention of philosophers laid on the text; it is a reading of the verb to be in the first person, spoken by the God who made everything else that is.

The second is the reading of presence. On this view the imperfect should be heard as a future, as it is in the large majority of its uses. Ehyeh occurs 45 times in the WLC, in 42 verses, and most English versions render most of them 'I will be'. The nearest is three verses back, 'I will be with you' (3:12), and the same promise recurs to Gideon in Judges 6:16 and to Moses again in 4:12 and 4:15, and it is the verb in the covenant promise 'I will be their God' in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Read this way, God answers a frightened man and an enslaved people not with a definition but with a pledge: I will be there, and you will know me by what I do. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, in their German translation of the Bible, rendered it with words meaning roughly I will be there as the one who will be there. The Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot 9b), followed by the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi, read it as a promise that God would be with Israel in this servitude and in the servitudes still to come. Hosea 1:9 is part of this case: when God pronounces judgment, the Hebrew says literally I will not be to you, using ehyeh, as if the name itself were being withdrawn.

The third is the causative reading. William F. Albright argued that the name YHWH was originally a causative form of the verb, he causes to be, a title of the creator, and his student Frank Moore Cross developed the case in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (1973), connecting it with a liturgical title of God as the one who creates the heavenly hosts. Its strength is that it explains the vowel a that most scholars reconstruct in the first syllable of the name, which fits the causative pattern better than the basic one, and it gives the name a content worthy of the God of Genesis 1. Its weakness is that it requires a different vocalisation from the one the Masoretes preserved in 3:14, and that the verb hayah never appears in the causative stem anywhere in the Hebrew Bible as we have it; in the Open Scriptures morphology of the WLC, every one of its more than three and a half thousand uses is in the basic stem, apart from about twenty in the niphal, the stem lesson 3 will introduce. Its defenders reply that the name is older than the vocalisation and older than the classical language. This is a reading about the origin of the name more than about the meaning of the sentence in Exodus.

The fourth is the reading of reserve. Moses asks for a name, and in the ancient world a name could be a handle: to know a god's name was to be able to call on it, even to use it. God answers with a sentence that turns back on itself, in the same idem per idem shape as Exodus 33:19, and several readers, Jewish and Christian, have heard in that a deliberate refusal to be pinned down: I am who I am, and you will not manage me. Its strength is that it explains why the answer has this circular shape at all, when God could simply have said YHWH, and it fits 33:19, where the same shape expresses God's sovereign freedom in showing mercy. Its weakness, which its defenders acknowledge, is that God does go on in 3:15 to give a name, freely and forever, so that whatever reserve there is in 3:14 is not a refusal to be known.

Here is what you can say plainly. The grammar allows all four, and the grammar alone will not decide between them. The immediate context is the strongest argument for the second, because 3:12 uses the same word as a promise; the present-tense uses of the imperfect, the history of translation and the New Testament's echoes are the strongest arguments for the first; the third is a theory about the name's origin that stands or falls on evidence outside the verse; the fourth is a reading of the sentence's shape that sits comfortably beside the second. Many interpreters hold two together, a God who is, and who therefore can be counted on to be there. What you should not do is tell a congregation that the Hebrew means one of them and only one, because the Hebrew is the very thing that leaves them open.

Put this into practice on the anchor. Open Exodus 3:14 in Blue Letter Bible, tap the Hebrew word behind the first 'I AM', and look at three things in turn. First the word as it stands in the verse, אֶהְיֶה. Second the lexical form, the dictionary entry, which is הָיָה, with Strong's number H1961. Third the parsing, which Blue Letter Bible shows as a line of words and STEP Bible as a short code you learned to read in module 2. The parsing should say qal, imperfect, first person, common, singular.

Now do the stripping yourself, to see why the tool says what it does. Take off the prefix א, which marks I in the imperfect. What is left is הְיֶה, and you can see the first two root letters, ה and י. The third, the final ה of hayah, is still written at the end, but in this form it is silent and only carries the vowel. So the root is ה-י-ה, and the prefix tells you that God is speaking of himself. You have just parsed the most discussed verb in the Old Testament, and you have seen exactly how much of the debate the parsing decides: none of it, and all of the ground on which the debate stands.

Then tap 'LORD' in 3:15. The tool will show you יְהוָה, H3068, and depending on the tool it may print the name with vowel points that tell the reader not to pronounce it as written, as the WLC does, because Jewish readers say Adonai, my Lord, at this point rather than pronouncing the name. Module 1's lesson on the vowel points explains why, and why the English form Jehovah is a misunderstanding. Read the lexicon entry and note, in your notebook, the words it uses about the name's origin: probably, perhaps, uncertain, disputed. Those small words are the lexicographer telling you honestly how much is known, and they are worth copying.

Finally, notice what the tool cannot show you. It cannot tell you which English time to give an imperfect; that is a translation decision. It cannot tell you whether a root connection between two words was in the writer's mind. It cannot tell you whether 3:14 is about being, presence, creation or freedom. What it can do, and what you can now do with it, is show you the root, the stem, the conjugation and the person, so that the debate you read about in a commentary is one you can follow with your own eyes.

Turn to the page in your Hebrew notebook where you wrote the reference of the Old Testament passage you chose for your capstone study. If you have not chosen one yet, choose it now: eight to fifteen verses of narrative or poetry that you expect to preach or teach in the coming year. A story from Genesis, Exodus, Ruth or Samuel will give you the most practice with the verbs in this module, but any passage will do.

On a new double page, draw a table with seven columns. Head them: Verse, Hebrew word, Sound, Root, Strong's number, Parsing, English in my Bible. You will add more columns in the next five lessons, so leave the right-hand page empty.

Open your passage in Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible on your phone. Go through it verse by verse and find every verb, including any word the tool parses as a participle or infinitive. For each one, fill in a row: the verse; the Hebrew word, copied letter by letter with its vowel points; how it sounds, in English letters; the root, written as three Hebrew consonants with hyphens between them; the Strong's number; the parsing, written out in full words, not code; and the English word or words your Bible uses for it. If your passage has more than about twenty-five verbs, do the first half this week.

Then choose three rows and try to find the root yourself before you look at the tool's lexical form, by taking off the prefix or suffix as section 1 showed. Put a tick where you got it right and a circle where the root was a weak one that hid a letter. Last, look down your Root column and see whether any root appears more than once in your passage. If one does, write a sentence about whether the writer seems to be drawing attention to it by repetition or wordplay, or whether it is simply a common verb. Keep this table. It is the first piece of your capstone study, and every lesson in this module adds to it.