Lesson 8 Hebrew Pronouns

To comprehend Biblical Hebrew, we must be able to identify pronouns with gender, number, and person

Pronouns are a form of shorthand so we don’t have to keep repeating nouns (because saying all of those nouns over and over can really wear you down77).

The main challenge with a pronoun is determining the noun it replaces. See what happened there? We used the pronoun “it”. You probably deduced “it” was referring to the word “pronoun,” not “noun.” That is because you are very familiar with English context and syntax.

  • The example, “John saw Bob. He said, ‘hello’” is ambiguous; we are not sure what the author meant to convey
  • The example “John saw Sally. He said, ‘hello’” is not ambiguous at all
  • Hebrew works very similarly

As such, this is an important topic that will take two lessons (8 and 9). A firm grasp of pronouns helps us to decipher what is happening in the narrative.

LESSON ITINERARY

  1. Define the phrase “independent personal pronoun”
  2. Identify and define Hebrew’s relative pronoun
  3. Identify Hebrew’s interrogative pronouns
  4. Distinguish the interrogative particle from the definite article
  5. Identify and translate the near and far demonstratives
  6. Detect demonstrative adjective use
  7. Detect demonstrative pronoun use

EQUIPMENT CHECK

Before continuing, can you describe the following concepts?

  • Define and translate substantival, attributive, and predicate adjectives (at a summary level)
  • How Hebrew inflects adjectives, so we can identify Gender and Number
  • The directional ending as compared with the FS ending

  1. If you grew up in the late 70s and early 80s, you might be familiar with the Schoolhouse Rock Pronoun video↩︎