I don’t remember ever being taught to read and write English. I know it must have happened, but it happened so early that I cannot recall a time before I had those skills. It’s part of the bedrock foundation of my mind, like blinking or breathing.

I do remember, however, being taught about vowels. Specifically, I remember being taught a little rhyme to remember them: A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y and W. The presence of W on this list has always perplexed me, as it probably perplexes you. I’m not in touch with anyone from my preschool class at this remove, but other people around my age have reacted with bewilderment when I trot out this extended version, as the version they learned stopped, sensibly, at Y. The only thing I can conclude is that somewhere in the American Heartland was a dedicated but not particularly effective Welsh revitalization activist.

Still, this mysterious W does point us towards today’s topic. Because it turns out, when you really try to dig into it on a technical level, it’s not trivial to pin down exactly what a vowel is, and different definitions can lead to different evaluations of edge cases like the second syllable of table or the word yarn.

This often happens, in my experience, when you start to dig into the fundamentals of a given field. Explaining what a loanword is takes a few sentences; explaining what a word is takes dissertation after dissertation with no end in sight. Proving the quadratic formula is possible with robust middle-school math; proving that one thing can equal another thing is an absolute nightmare. There is a certain squishiness to the world, it seems to me, that resists the project of translating fuzzy intuitive understandings into rigorous formalized specificity [a].

[a] Or, more properly: The squishiness is not in the world, but in us and our squishy human brains.

You may have encountered the claim that verb tenses in Biblical Hebrew are somewhat squishy. Often, I think people make too much of this. It’s true that the so-called past tense in Biblical Hebrew isn’t always and exclusively used to refer to events that have already happened, but that’s true for English, too. If I say, “It’s 2050. A coalition of people of goodwill thwarted the fascist tide and laid the foundation for a just and sustainable society in its wake...”, we understand that I’m describing something in the future even tho grammatically, most of the verbs I’m using are past tense. And, in the reverse, I can use future-tense verbs to talk about the past, as if I wrote in a memoir, “Soon I will go off to college and lose touch with all these people. I will forget most of their faces, and all of their names...”. Linguists, being good academics, love to categorize things and come up with clever taxonomic labels to flag usages like this, but these usages aren’t particularly mysterious, and nor do they mean that English verbs don’t really have tenses.

It’s certainly fair to point out (and dig into) the fact that Biblical Hebrew verb tenses work differently than English ones — in particular, it seems clear that Biblical Hebrew verb forms are much more tied to completion or duration than English ones are (the Hebrew past tense indicates an action that is completed or that happens in a moment in time, whereas the future indicates an action that is incomplete or that happens over a longer span of time, with these indications often carrying more weight in determining the form of the verb than the temporal location of the action compared to the moment of narration) — but by and large at the 101 level, I think it’s not wrong to treat Biblical Hebrew’s two full tenses as pointing towards the past and towards the future [b][c].

[b] It’s worth noting in passing that one can make a distinction between the conceptual issue two languages thinking about time differently and the translational issue of using different verb tenses in the target language than in the source language to capture the same temporal framework. Temporal relationships in a sentence can get quite gnarly — consider the back-and-forth pileup of “Yesterday, I thought I would go to the store this morning, but then it was sleeting, so now I’m going on Thursday” — and it’s not surprising that different languages should take different approaches to tying convolutedly connected moments in time to forms of a verb.
[c] If you want the full skinny on what the heck is going on with tenses in Biblical Hebrew, I can do no better than to steer you to the eighty-odd page discussion of it in Paul Joüon and Takemitsu Muraoka’s Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, which is unexpectedly readable despite its daunting technical density, and is also mostly free of untranslated Latin.

So now that I’ve expressed my irritation with people raising a fuss about Biblical Hebrew verbs’ non-English relationship with grammatical tense, I’m going to go ahead and raise a fuss about Biblical Hebrew verbs’ non-English relationship with grammatical tense.

In Shəmot 15:16, we read, in the Song of the Sea, בִּגְדֹל זְרוֹעֲךָ יִדְּמוּ כָּאָֽבֶן עַד־יַעֲבֹר עַמְּךָ יי | bigdol zəro’akha yidəmu ka’áven ad ya’avor aməkhe [haSheim] | “by Your mighty arm, [all who dwell in Kaná’an] will be inert as a stone until Your people cross, [haSheim]”. I’ve translated the verb I want to spend time with today, yidəmu, as “will be inert”, and that’s already a bit of a fudge: This verse is a very clear temporal clause, and really just means that the stillness was incomplete until the crossing was — a classic case of Biblical Hebrew deploying a future-tense verb to describe an incomplete action more than one that has yet to occur. I don’t think it would be wrong to translate this as “they were inert until Your people crossed”, and I wouldn’t argue against someone who put forth the claim that that translation more closely matches how this text would have been understood when it was first composed.

But that very incompleteness strikes me. We’re reading the Exodus story now; we’ll encounter it again in a few months’ time at Pésaḥ, and then a few months after that at Shavu’ot. We read references to it twice a day during the Shəma, and bind excerpts from it to ourselves in təfilin most mornings. Liturgically, we are, in a sense, never done with the Exodus. We’re always in the middle of it, it’s always incomplete. We are always mid-trudge on an exposed seabed, a ferocious wind blowing around us, terror seizing those the Torah thinks are our enemies. No one can move; everyone is stone; we are stuck in this liminal moment forever.

And so perhaps these future-tense verbs, these verbs of incompleteness, come to teach us that the terror and the crossing are linked, that neither one can end until both end. As long as our movement is a source of petrifying dread to those who are Not Us, we will never finish our crossing. As long as we cross with the purpose of conquest, destruction, and dispossession, we will never reach the other shore. Only when those we must share this beautiful Earth with have no cause to fear our crossing will we be able to complete it. We will never get truly free if we attempt to build our freedom on the corpse of others’. It’s all of us or none of us.

This is, admittedly, reading very aggressively against the text. But what of that? We have been blessed to multiply like fish; is it any surprise if we sometimes swim upstream?