שָׁלוֹם שָׁלוֹם!

מה יש לנו כאן?

@enegue Ah, unfortunately that's too advanced for this beginner. Could you break it down?

A London Bobby walks down the street and notices a robbery in progress. He rocks back on his heels and says, "Hello, Hello... What do we have here?". Like a spy pass code. I thought you were giving me the first part -- "Hello, Hello". So, I completed it -- "What do we have here?"

Ah, I see!

Thank you :)

@enegue I know מָה, just not the other words. The word I know for "we" is אֲנַחְנוּ.

יש looks like a complicated word!

I have to let you in on a little secret. I didn't know what you typed till I typed your Hebrew expression into Google Translate. When I thought of my response, I put my English reply into Google Translate, and it gave me the Hebrew. To verify what it gave me, I put the Hebrew back in. Since the English it gave me was exactly what I typed, then I could be pretty sure it was kosher. :)

Haha.

I tried looking up יש and it seems to be somewhere between an adverb and a verb... strange! מה means "what".

Time for me to go sleep. Wish I knew how to say "good night" in Hebrew. Anyway, good night!

מֶ֣ה in ancient Hebrew is an interrogative, "What?", like in Genesis 4:10. I had to look that up from previous work I've done. I don't know about modern Hebrew, though?

לילה טוב courtesy of GT.

@ktm5124 In this case the "we" is hiding as the pronoun suffix נו– after the preposition ל, which is expressing possession like the English "have". Literally "what is there to us here?", i.e. "what have we here?". Cf. Gen 44:20: יש לנו אב = "there is to us a father", i.e. "we have a father".

@Susan Thanks for lending your expertise on this. :-)

@Dɑvïd (320 days later) I finally got a chance to play שבץ נא. It turned out to be somewhat easier than expected because we allowed plene or defective spelling, which adds a lot of flexibility, and you can pretty much add vav to the beginning of anything (and the end of many things...), and the lack of specified vowels means you don't really have to know exactly what you're doing... OK, we probably needed a Hebrew teacher around, but it was fun anyway.

@Dɑvïd @Caleb - I think we all agree that in principle the topic is a good question which needs to be dealt with, but the form of the question just isn't great. Maybe it just needs a good Edit to draw down its scope?

To be fair, even at a glance it reads precisely like a university-level essay question.

@Caleb I'd say it is too broad (though it looks like I picked a different close vote reason, oops.)

None of the answers seem to even attempt to give an overview, nor are they based on any published academic texts on hermeneutics as a discipline.

@Susan - I'm impressed. I'm terrible at Scrabble in English.

I think a lot could be found on the role of the spirit and the perspicuity of scripture, and I think Calvin talks in book 1 about how we cannot understand the scriptures without the Spirit, but an overview of everything is just so big

If the question is to remain open then the answers need a culling

Is dagesh pronounced daGESH or DAgesh?

@Susan Thanks, Susan! Great explanation. I especially enjoyed the Genesis quote, which further illustrates the idea.