im

This is the ordinary Hebrew word for putting a condition on something. It hangs one statement on another: do this, and that follows; fail to do it, and something else does. Jacob uses it at Bethel when he says that if God will keep him on his journey and bring him home, then the LORD will be his God.

One Hebrew word covers a spread of cases that English hands to several different words. It can introduce:

• a live possibility the speaker thinks may well happen
• an imagined case set up only to make a point, such as counting the dust of the earth
• something granted for the sake of argument, where English says "even though"
• a circumstance that keeps coming around, where English says "whenever"
• a longing, where English says "if only"

The shading comes from the sentence around the word, not from the word itself. In the law codes the pattern is unusually tidy: a case is opened with a different word (כִּי) and then broken into branches, and each branch begins with this one. A reader meeting it in Exodus or Leviticus is usually being handed a sub-case rather than the main rule.

Hebrew oaths were once spelled out in full: may God do such and such to me, and worse, if I do this. Over time the curse half fell away and only the condition was left standing, so that surviving half now carries the whole weight of the oath. To English eyes the result looks like an unfinished sentence whose meaning is the reverse of its words.

Standing alone, the word denies. When Uriah tells David "by your life, if I do this thing," he is swearing that he will not do it. Add the word for "not" and it affirms: "if I do not do this" becomes a promise that he certainly will. What looks like a condition is a refusal, and what looks like a negative is a pledge.

This is what makes Psalm 95:11 sound so strange in a literal rendering. God says of the wilderness generation, word for word, "if they enter my rest," and the meaning is that they never will.

When a question offers two answers, Hebrew marks the first half with a short question marker and opens the second half with this word. Joshua meets a man with a drawn sword outside Jericho and asks whether he is for us or for our enemies, and it is this word that carries the "or".

The same word introduces what is being asked when a question is reported rather than spoken aloud: Abraham's servant watches in silence to learn whether the LORD has made his journey a success. Job leans on it constantly, since so much of that book argues by asking.

Outside these two patterns the word rarely asks a plain question on its own, and where it does, the text is usually late or poetic. Ordinary alternatives in a plain statement take a different word (אוֹ).

This meaning belongs to a two word pairing, not to the word on its own. After a denial, the pair marks the exception. God tells Abram that no one from his household will be his heir, except a son who comes from his own body.

In other places the same pair swings the sentence around to what is true instead of what has just been ruled out: not this, but that. What the LORD asks of Israel is nothing other than to fear him and walk in his ways.

Translators have long found the pairing slippery, and English versions rotate through "except", "unless", "but rather", "only", and occasionally "surely". A recent study of all 156 places where the two words stand together argues that they mark what the sentence is really putting the weight on, which is why no single English word covers them all. A second pairing, with a different word meaning "apart from", does the same job in a handful of verses.

In a small group of verses this word is tacked onto the ordinary word for "until" without changing what that word means. Abraham's servant refuses to eat until he has said what he came to say. God promises Jacob that he will not leave him until he has done what he spoke.

The addition gives the clause a slight sense of waiting on something still open, but the plain sense is simply "until", and English translations render it that way.