Just Messing with You

to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, “What do these stones mean?”  Joshua 4:6  NIV

Ask – Don’t you just love the messiness of Hebrew?  It’s so pedestrian.  No Greek eloquence.  No tight specifications for definitions.  Sloppy translations suffice because the language is so flexible.  And filled with exquisite oddities, like qere ketiv (see March 20).  In this verse we come across another of these strange Hebrew constructions.  It’s called the paragogic Nun.  Let me show you where it occurs.

Here’s the opening of this verse in Hebrew.  I’ve highlighted the extra nun at the end of the verb šāʾal (to ask).  The verbal form is third person, plural, masculine, imperfect.  That means it matches the subject (plural: “children”), treating the collection as Hebrew usually does (masculine), and describing a continuing action (imperfect: not finished).  But the normal conjugation of this verb in this case should be יִשְׁאָלוּ, without the final nun.  As you can see, this verb has an appended nun.  This is the paragogic nun.

לְמַעַן תִּהְיֶה זֹאת אוֹת–בְּקִרְבְּכֶם  כִּי-יִשְׁאָלוּן

In Hebrew morphology, the paragogic nun (from paragoge ‘addition at the end of a word’^[1]) is a nun letter (נ‎) added at the end of certain verb forms, without changing the general meaning of the conjugation. Its function is debated and may involve a modal change to the meaning of the verb.^[2]

It occurs most commonly in the plural 2nd and 3rd persons of imperfect forms. Examples include: ‘you shall live’ as תִּחְיוּן‎ instead of תִּחְיוּ‎, ‘you shall inherit’ as תִּירָשׁוּן‎ instead תִּירָשׁוּ‎ (Deuteronomy 5:33).

It is a common phenomenon, appearing 106 times in the Pentateuch, but has unequal distribution: 58 occurrences in Deuteronomy, none in Leviticus.^{[3] [1]}

Just imagine!  There are 106 occurrences of this oddity, and no one really knows why they are there.  Even more perplexing is the fact that the paragogic nun never occurs in Leviticus and has nearly half of its occurrences in one book, Deuteronomy.  Do you suppose (just speculating, of course) that Deuteronomy was written by someone other than the author of Leviticus?  That the convention of adding a nun was part of the linguistic culture during the time of Deuteronomy but not Leviticus?  Or maybe, if we want to hang on to Mosaic authorship for both, Moses just got into a mood and started adding nuns toward the end of his life.  Try to find that in the DSM-5!

I’ve got to tell you, “I love it!”  It makes the text so human!  I can relate to that.  Messy.

Topical Index: paragogic nun, ask, Joshua 4:6

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragogic_nun