“Why does a Vav turn the future into the past in Hebrew?” asks a reader. It’s a great question, with a fascinating answer.
The reader is referring to vav ha-hipuch, the “changing” Vav, which, in biblical Hebrew — but not modern Hebrew — appears to change verbs from the past tense into the future and vice versa.
Normally, in both biblical and modern Hebrew, a prefixed Vav means “and.” “Eilat and Tel Aviv” in Hebrew is eilat v’tel aviv. But in biblical Hebrew, the Vav seems to have an additional function. While y’dabeir means “he will speak,” vay’dabeir — with a Vav before the verb — means either “and he will speak” or “he spoke,” as in the very common vay’dabeir Adonai el mosheh (“Adonai spoke to Moses.”) It works the other way around, too. While haya means “he was,” v’haya means either “and he was” or “he will be.”
But we know from linguistics that letters don’t magically change the tenses on verbs, so something else must be going on. We also know from linguistics that tense patterns vary widely within a language depending on circumstances.
For example, formal English prefers the past tense, as when a waiter at a fancy restaurant asks, “did you want desert tonight?” (The wrong answer is, “yes, I did, but it’s too late now.”) Similarly, news about the past is often presented in the present tense: “Four rockets land in uninhabited areas in the north,” might be the beginning of a newscast. Sports sometimes requires the future tense for what has already happened: After Maccabee Tel Aviv scores a winning goal seconds before the end of the game, the sports announcer cries, “and that’ll be the game!” Will be? Why not “was”?Read More »