Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Trevor & Julie Peterson" <06peterson AT cua.edu>]

Ron wrote:

> but the word which is translated "made"
> (I'm not sure how to transliterate it for your list) appears to me to
be
> Qal,
> Imperfect, 3CP, with the Waw Conversive.  Why then is it not
translated,
> "He
> took this from their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool and
[THEY]
> made it into a molten calf."?  Am I missing something elementary here?

Yes. (Sorry to be blunt, but that is the answer to your question.) The
form vayya'asehu is 3ms + 3ms object suffix. The root is 'ayin-sin-yod,
which the dictionaries will tend to list as 'ayin-sin-he. In some ways,
I think it's less confusing to keep in mind that these so-called III-he
forms are really III-yod, with the yod dropped in various ways. The
simple imperfect form would be ya'ase, with he used as a final vowel
marker. The vayyiqtol form shortens this to vayya'as. The 3ms suffix
-ehu is added to this short form to yield what we find in the text. If
this were the plural form, as you thought, it would be vayya'asu. The
plural ending replaces the final yod altogether. A good rule of thumb is
to be suspicious if you see what looks like a retained III-he before the
verb ending. If you keep in mind that the he is there only to mark the
presence of a final vowel, it should make sense that it goes away when
something else is added on the end. The he in our form, then, can only
be that of the object suffix.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics