How the Three Stooges helped me translate the Old Testament
From UkrainianBible
In addition to their well-known contributions to American culture and etiquette, the Three Stooges occasionally help me remember a difficult Hebrew word.
If you took the usual high-school language classes, you ain't seen nothing yet. French, Spanish, German and even Latin are nowhere near as complex as Hebrew and are much easier. Consider one single word I ran into. Deuteronomy 28:64 starts out with the word Vehephitsekhaw. The V means and but the added e converts the following verb tense into its opposite–a past tense becomes a future tense. It also tells you that the next word is a verb, which helps, because at first it looked like a noun with the word "the" attached onto the front. (One of the many reasons why Hebrew is so hard is that many words are so confounded long. Onto the front of a word they'll stick a conjunction, a preposition, the definite article and a verb prefix; and then on the back they'll have the personal ending AND a direct object. You can get a whole sentence in one word! And as long as the words are, some of them disappear so you can't find them in the dictionary!)
But one of these prefixes tells you it's a verb, so you can subtract the prefixes and suffixes and the verb is down to manageable size–hephiyts with a direct object of thee. So. We've got it down to the basic verb and its direct object: And somebody will do something to thee, it says. The following word shows that the somebody is the Lord and the thee is obviously Israel. What will He do?
Well, the prefixed letters he on hephiytz can mean various things, but because of the iy in the middle of the verb it means that the Lord will cause Israel to do something. What will the Lord cause Israel to do? Subtract the he and the iy and you have the basic verb. This leaves only two compound letters to analyze, ph and ts, so there must be a hidden letter somewhere because Hebrew verbs all have three consonants. How can I find it in a dictionary if I don't even know how it's spelled? The verb might be yaphats or phatsah but I happen to know that there is a three letter verb phoots, except that it's pronounced poots. This reminds me of the Yiddish slang word putz, which now means an ineffectual bumbler. What ineffectual Jewish bumbler comes immediately to mind? The Three Stooges, of course; they're always putzing around. And when they do Moe says "Spread out!" Which is one of the three meanings of phoots. Spread out, disperse or scatter. So: "The Lord will cause Israel to disperse," or "The Lord will scatter Israel."
And that's how the Three Stooges helped me remember a difficult word whenever it occurs.
