the Berasit Hebrew Dictionary

This is an old revision of the document!

---

In theory the Hebrew word for “to be” is 'ahih'

But we find a variety of spellings.

oihi, ihi, ihih, hiteh

This might be similar to how English has “be”, “been”, “is”, “am”, “are”, “was”, “were”, etc.¹⁾ This claim is dubuis given the fact that grammar was only barely beginning to be defined during the Babylonian period with the bulk of the work being done in Sanskrit. It is rather unlikely that the ancient Hebrew language would have already included such technology. This becomes even less likely the further back one pushes the original date of writing.

It is quite possible to test this hypothesis scientifically. We would need to arrange each spelling against each instance's contextual information regarding tense, person, and number. I'll put that on my to do list

LexID 1961