Hebrew word order
I was looking at Psalm 139:11 in the Hebrew and noticing the word order in the second part of the verse is .“night [becomes] light around me” This confused me because almost all
translations have instead “light [becomes] night around me”
In Hebrew the
order is normally verb-subject-object (“eat we cookies”) as
opposed to English order of subject-verb-object (“We eat cookies”). In both however the subject precedes the object. That seems
to be reversed here in the Hebrew to object-subject (cookies-we).
I see the same thing in v 16 of this psalm
which in Hebrew order is “my shapeless form saw your eyes”
(object-verb-subject) but is again translated “your eyes saw my
shapeless form” (subject-verb-object).
Can someone point me to the grammatical-syntactical rule governs this reversed syntax in Hebrew? How do we know that it should be read this way (The cookies eat us)? In Greek it would be clear from the grammatical form which is nominative and which is accusative, but there is no such thing in Hebrew which makes me kinda crazy 
Any insights appreciated.
Comments
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The context demands it, because the clear sense of the first clause of the sentence provides the context of how it should be understood. This is how Keil & Delitsch analyse it.
"and if I should say, let nothing but darkness cover me, and as night (the predicate placed first, as in Amos 4:13) let the light become about me, i.e., let the light become night that shall surround and cover me (בַּעֲדֵנִי, poetic for בַּעֲדִי, like תַּחְתֵּנִי in 2 Sam. 22)—the darkness would spread abroad no obscurity (Ps. 105:28) that should extend beyond (מִן) Thy piercing eye and remove me from Thee."
Remember that this is poetry and the rhythm not infrequently dictates the word order.
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Alan Macgregor said:
The context demands it, because the clear sense of the first clause of the sentence provides the context of how it should be understood. This is how Keil & Delitsch analyse it.
"and if I should say, let nothing but darkness cover me, and as night (the predicate placed first, as in Amos 4:13) let the light become about me, i.e., let the light become night that shall surround and cover me (בַּעֲדֵנִי, poetic for בַּעֲדִי, like תַּחְתֵּנִי in 2 Sam. 22)—the darkness would spread abroad no obscurity (Ps. 105:28) that should extend beyond (מִן) Thy piercing eye and remove me from Thee."
Remember that this is poetry and the rhythm not infrequently dictates the word order.
Thanks for the explanation Alan, I thought it had something to do with it being poetry.
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Alan Macgregor said:
The context demands it, because the clear sense of the first clause of the sentence provides the context of how it should be understood.
Contextually it could easily be read as
the opposite:I say "surely this darkness will
crush me!" and [suddenly] night becomes light around me! (v 11)This reading would actually make more sense
with the next verse:"Even darkness is made un-dark for you,
and night is made to shine like the day."Since there is no punctuation in Hebrew and the verses were added in hundreds of years later we can only guess where the sentence begins or ends. Does it go with what comes before in the verse, or with what comes after? Hard to say. And yet it is consistently translated as "light becomes night" So I think there is something else going on here besides just context that has more to do with rules of Hebrew syntax. I just don't know what.
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The Second part of the verse is a verbless clause. VSO is only applicable to verbal clauses. Moreover this "order" is much debated.
The second part of the verse begins with a subject לילה followed by a predicate אור בעדני where אור is the nucleus and בעדני is I think what is called in English an adverbial or an attribute (In semitic languages the distinction is sometimes artirficial). Thus word order is "according to standard".
I therefore agree with the Shark above me. (I always liked "Jaws")
Edit: Have a look at the following search:
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David Knoll said:
I therefore agree with the Shark above me.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I'm not sure I agree with myself here, LOL! That is, I think there is something going on grammatically/syntactically that I don't know about. Greek comes pretty easy for me, but Hebrew is so inexact that it make my head spin.[*-)]
p.s. I'm glad the "shark above me" loves his enemies!
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Alan Macgregor said:
The context demands it, because the clear sense of the first clause of the sentence provides the context of how it should be understood.
I read it as synthetic parallelism in which the initial statement is built upon to add emphasis and heighten the effect. Cf. Psalm 73:1. The word-order inversion adds to the effect of highlighting the statement about darkness. (It will be interesting to see what the Lexham Discourse Hebrew/Old Testament makes of this verse.)
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