5.10 Other Hebrew Definiteness

  • The Article is not the only way Hebrew indicates definiteness

An individual’s name and most proper nouns are definite by definition.

  • דָּוִד is definite
    • We will never see: *הַדָּוִד
    • In English we would never say “The Izzy teaches Hebrew”. It’s just “Izzy teaches Hebrew”.
  • On the other hand, names of people groups and some geographic features often take the article. הַיַּרְדֵּן= the Jordan River.

A word with a pronominal suffix is definite since the suffix indicates possession, and possession is definite67.

  • In English, we don’t say “his the book”; we say, “his book”. “Book” is understood to be definite.

A Hebrew word in its construct state is definite when the last word in the construct chain is definite

  • A construct chain in English might be “the book of the sister of the king”; in other words in English we generally do add the definite article
  • Hebrew would literally be, “book of sister of the king”, but all words in the chain are understood to be definite
  • We will discuss construct chains in Lesson 10

  1. Pronominal suffixes are the subject of Lesson 9↩︎