the strongest "please" in Hebrew: a cry of urgent pleading, "Ah, I beg you!", spoken almost only to God and almost always at a moment of crisis
This is one short cry, and it stands at the very front of whatever the speaker goes on to say. It is built out of two pieces: a gasp of pain or alarm, "Ah!", and the small ordinary word that turns a command into a request, "please" (נָא). Stacking the two makes the most forceful plea the language has. It does not merely ask; it asks the way a person asks when something has gone badly wrong.
It appears only thirteen times, and nearly always at a hinge in the story, spoken to God:
- Moses begging forgiveness after the golden calf
- Hezekiah weeping on what he believes is his deathbed
- the sailors in the storm, praying to the God of Israel for the first time
- the long confessions of Nehemiah and Daniel after the exile
- the crowd's doubled cry at the temple gate in Psalm 118
Usually the cry sits directly in front of the request, and a second "please" is attached to the request itself, so the plea is marked twice over. But not always. Once it opens an admission of guilt with no request attached (Exodus 32:31). Once it braces a declaration rather than a plea, "I am your servant" (Psalm 116:16). Once, in Jonah's mouth, the humblest word in the language is turned around into a complaint that God has been too merciful. And once it is aimed at a human being: Joseph's brothers use it to beg his pardon.
The doubled cry of Psalm 118:25, "please, LORD, save now," was sung at the great festivals, and the request it introduces is the phrase behind the shout the crowds raise in the Gospels, "Hosanna" (ὡσαννά).
Nuances
Disputed
What the particle of entreaty נָא embedded in this compound actually contributes, and therefore how the compound generates its force. The disagreement concerns נָא itself, not the meaning of the interjection, on which BDB, HALOT, and DCH are unanimous.
- majorityנָא is a marker of entreaty, functionally Biblical Hebrew's "please", softening a directive into a request; the compound therefore stacks an exclamation of distress onto a politeness marker to yield the strongest available plea.; BDB, s.v. נָא; Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, tr. A. E. Cowley, 2nd Eng. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910), §105a-b; Paul Joüon and T. Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, rev. Eng. ed. (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2006), §105c; Stephen A. Kaufman, "An Emphatic Plea for Please," Maarav 7 (1991): 195-198
- minorityנָא marks the following directive as a logical consequence of the immediately preceding statement or of the situation in which it is uttered, rather than as a form of politeness; the appearance of two such particles in one clause (Num 12:13) is held to tell against a simple "please".; Thomas O. Lambdin, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (New York: Scribner's, 1971), 170-171; Bruce K. Waltke and M. O'Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990), §34.7; Steven E. Fassberg, Studies in Biblical Syntax (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1994), 36-73
- minorityנָא is a politeness device of the sociolinguistic kind, marking an utterance as a personal request made of the addressee; its complete absence from legislative material is offered as decisive against any purely logical-consequence account.; Timothy Wilt, "A Sociolinguistic Analysis of NA'," Vetus Testamentum 46.2 (1996): 237-255; Ahouva Shulman, "The Particle נָא in Biblical Hebrew Prose," Hebrew Studies 40 (1999): 57-82