Back in Lesson 4, we discussed the difference between “inflecting” and “parsing”
Inflecting is when we take a verb root such as מלך and transform it by adding vowels, prefixes or suffixes to generate a specific form with a unique meaning
For example, if you were told to inflect מלך into Qal Perfect first-person, common singular (QP1cs), you would provide “מָלַכְתִּי”
As we said back in Lesson 4, no part of reading the Hebrew Bible requires you to inflect, so we keep inflecting activities to a minimum
Parsing can be thought of as going in the reverse direction
Say you encounter a verb such as “מָלַכְתִּי”
In time, you will be able to determine that מָלַכְתִּי is the QP1cs form of מלך, and means “I ruled” or “I was king”
To accurately translate the Hebrew you read in Scripture, we will be doing a lot of parsing