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#*#*# (C) RashiYomi Inc. 2009, Dr. Hendel, President #*#*#
      3. RASHI METHOD: GRAMMAR
      BRIEF EXPLANATION: Rashi explains verses using grammar principles, that is, rules which relate reproducable word form to word meaning. Grammatical rules neatly fall into 3 categories
      • (a) the rules governing conjugation of individual words,Biblical roots,
      • (b) the rules governing collections of words,clauses, sentences
      • (c) miscellaneous grammatical, or form-meaning, rules.
      This examples applies to Rashis Ex17-15b
      URL Reference: (c) http://www.Rashiyomi.com/w35n5.htm
      Brief Summary: And Moses named the altar [after the fact that] God [is] our source of miracles.

    There are two main parts to grammar.
  • The rules of conjugating individual or pairs of words such as verbs, nouns, pronouns, or creating gender or plurality agreement between two words
  • The rules governing overall sentence structure.

One rule governing sentence structure is grammatical functional sequence. Most Hebrew sentences are stated in a Verb-Subject-Object sequence. Similarly many noun phrases are stated in Noun-Adjective sequence.

    Verse Ex17-15b discussing the altar Moses built to commemorate the defeat of Amalayk states And Moses built an altar and called its name God-our-miracle. This sentence seems to have an ordindary sentence sequence:
    • The word called is the verb
    • The word its name is the object
    • The word phrase God-our-miracle is a noun-adjective pair that functions as an indirect object
    So the sentence appears to have a typical Verb-Object-Indirect-Object order.

But the Biblical Masoretic text has a pausal line inserted. The verse actually reads And Moses built an altar and called its name God || our-miracle. One can actually see these vertical lines in printed Bibles. There are a variety of opinions on why these lines occur. One reason for some of these pausal lines is to indicate non-standard sentence sequence. Thus God our miracle without the line indicates an idiomatic phrase constituting a name. By contrast God || our miracle with the pausal line indicates God [is] our miracle. The pausal line hints at an elliptical verb for which we have to pause and add. The whole sentence then reads And Moses built an altar and called its name [on the fact that] God ||[is] our-miracle.

In other words Rashi states The phrase God our miracle is not the actual name of the altar but rather the reason for the name or calling of the altar (Which is not given). We have further explained above that the driving force for this suggested difference - between an actual name God-our-miracle and the name reason God [is] our miracle - is indicated by the pausal line which indicates a missing verb, is, for which we have to pause and add.


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