Parashah of the week: Chayei Sarah

Biblical Hebrew is compact in that just one Hebrew word might need a few to convey the meaning in English. It is also remarkably word-efficient in that there just aren’t so many words to choose from, perhaps just a couple of thousand roots for the entire biblical vocabulary.

If it’s pointed Hebrew (with the dots and vowels) it can help, but in any case you’d think that working out which three letters are at the root of a particular word wouldn’t be too difficult, once you’ve pruned back all the prefixes, infixes, suffixes and other distractions. But occasionally one of the three root letters drops out of the final form and makes identifying the full root (and thereby locating it in a dictionary) a little harder.

Rebecca demonstrates this grammatical trick for us. On approaching Isaac (on a camel) for the first time… va-tissa. The root is nun-sin-aleph, with a little dot in the letter sin as the remaining clue to the missing nun. Va-tissa, she lifted (her eyes) and then va-teire, “she saw”, although this time the root letter you can’t see is the third letter, a heh.

So Rebecca looked up and saw Isaac. And then? Va-tippol. It’s the same process. Take off the vav-tav prefix to leave the peh and lammed, perhaps noticing the dot in the peh indicating the nun that has fallen out.