The small, high-frequency words for I, you, he, she, we, they — the building blocks of verbless clauses, emphatic subjects, and third-person copular sentences. Ten forms; one paradigm; a doorway into reading whole Hebrew sentences.
Hebrew verbs are inflected: the verb-ending itself already tells you the subject. שָׁמַרְתִּי means "I kept" — the -ti ending does the work of "I."
So why do we need free-standing pronouns at all? Three reasons:
Master the ten pronouns and you can read complete Hebrew sentences, even without verbs.
Biblical Hebrew preserves two forms for "I." Same meaning, different register.
Both mean "I." אָנֹכִי tends to appear in divine speech, poetry, and solemn pronouncement (e.g., the Ten Commandments). אֲנִי dominates ordinary narrative.
Both are common enough that you must recognize both on sight.
In the singular, Hebrew distinguishes masculine and feminine "you."
Notice: both begin with at-. The masculine adds a long -ah ending; the feminine ends with just a silent shewa.
The third-person singular pronouns. Both begin with h-, distinguished by their vowel.
These two pronouns have a special role in Hebrew: in addition to being ordinary subjects, they often serve as the copula ("is") in three-word verbless clauses. We'll see this pattern in slide 13.
Tip: vowel = gender. Long "u" (shureq) = masculine; long "i" (hireq-yod) = feminine.
Like the singular, the first-person plural has just one form — no gender distinction.
anachnu — "we"
The form is built from a stem nachn- with a 1cp ending -u. It's a single high-frequency word — meet it once, know it always.
The plural "you" — masculine and feminine, like the singular.
Both begin with at-, like the singular forms. Endings: -em (masculine plural, very common) and -en (feminine plural, rarer).
Pattern: the m / n contrast (-em / -en) is the standard m.pl./f.pl. ending throughout Hebrew grammar. You will meet it on nouns, verbs, and pronouns alike.
The plural "they" — masculine and feminine. Both begin with h-, matching the third-person singular.
Each form has a short and a longer variant. הֵם / הֵן are more common; הֵמָּה / הֵנָּה appear especially in poetry and in pausal forms.
Same m / n contrast as the second-person plurals: m.pl. ends in -m, f.pl. in -n.
2nd person all begin with at-. 3rd person all begin with h-. 1st person breaks the pattern.
Look back at the paradigm. The first person has only one form in each number:
This is called common gender. The logic is intuitive: a speaker's gender is usually obvious from context, so the language doesn't bother to mark it. By contrast, when speaking about someone (3rd person) or to someone (2nd person), gender often must be indicated.
The same asymmetry returns in the verb endings: 1cs and 1cp are common, while 2nd and 3rd person endings carry gender.
Hebrew has two words for "I." Both mean exactly the same thing — but they differ in feel.
Comparative Semitics confirms אָנֹכִי is the older form (cf. Akkadian anāku, Phoenician ʾnk). Hebrew gradually shortened it for everyday use but kept the long form for elevated speech.
Famous use of anokhi: אָנֹכִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ "I am YHWH your God" — the opening of the Ten Commandments (Ex 20:2).
Hebrew verbs already encode the subject. So when a pronoun is added alongside the verb, it's not making the sentence grammatical — it's adding emphasis or contrast.
A careful reader notices the explicit pronoun and asks: why is it here? The answer is often theologically significant — emphasizing the speaker's identity, role, or contrast with others.
In a verbless clause whose subject is a noun (not a pronoun), the third-person pronoun can stand between subject and predicate, functioning like English "is."
Agreement rule: the copula matches its subject in gender and number. Feminine subject takes הִיא; plural takes הֵם / הֵן.
One of the most distinctive sentences in the Hebrew Bible:
"I am YHWH"
160+ occurrences in Leviticus alone. Well over 300 in the whole Old Testament. Concentrated in Leviticus, Ezekiel, and Isaiah 40–66.
The formula functions as a divine signature: God seals a command, promise, or judgment with his own name. The grammatical core is simply pronoun + divine name, verbless.
"You shall be holy, for I am holy — I am YHWH your God" (Lev 19:2).
The Bible is full of self-identifications, but none is as theologically loaded as God's אֲנִי.
When God speaks Torah in Leviticus, he does not simply legislate. He signs each command with his own name and pronoun: "I am YHWH." The pronoun is small — two syllables, three letters — but it changes everything: the command is not a tribal regulation but the personal word of the God who is.
In the New Testament, Jesus picks up this same first-person mode of speech (the Johannine "I am" sayings). His hearers, steeped in Leviticus and Isaiah, knew exactly what he was claiming.
The aleph that opens אֲנִי is the first letter of the alphabet. It is also the first letter of God's self-identification in the law. The whole Bible begins, in a sense, with God saying "I."
"I AM WHO I AM" (Ex 3:14)
A student new to pronouns might assume the "I" here is the pronoun אֲנִי. It is not.
אֶהְיֶה is a verb — the 1cs imperfect of "to be" (הָיָה). The "I" inside the English translation comes from the verb-ending, not from a pronoun. Three words: verb + relative particle + verb.
The divine name יְהוָה is itself etymologically related to the verb "to be" — which is why God here grounds his name in his own being.
Preview: you'll meet the verb "to be" formally in Lesson 17.
Without looking back, write out:
Ten minutes of drilling today and tomorrow will lock the paradigm in for good.
Ten pronouns. Three jobs: subject of a verbless clause, emphasis with a verb, copula in third-person sentences. The "I" of God's self-identification. The doorway into reading whole Hebrew sentences.
Next lesson: the verbless clause as a whole — predicate adjectives, demonstratives, and prepositional phrases as predicates.