התקווה: The National Anthem

Eight lines is a small text to build a grammar page on, and this one repays it out of all proportion. It contains a conjunction you will use to negotiate with a landlord, a suffix you will use every day to say "home", two participles built on a root class that governs hundreds of ordinary verbs, and one vowel that decides whether a word is a noun or the front half of a construct chain. None of that requires you to have any feeling about the poem.

Which text this is, and why it can be quoted whole

The words are by Naftali Herz Imber (1856–1909), who composed a long poem called תִּקְוָתֵנוּ in 1878; it was printed in 1886 in his first collection, ברקאי. The anthem is not that poem. It is Imber's opening stanza plus a replaced second stanza, and the differences are not trivial.

Imber's own first stanza ends with a bound noun where the anthem has a bare one:

And his refrain named an old hope rather than an aged one:

Who replaced it is reported differently: he.wikisource credits the 1905 revision to the teacher Yehuda Leib Metman-Cohen (1869–1939), while he.wikipedia follows David Yudilovitch's memoirs and credits Imber's Rishon LeZion circle. Both sources agree on the other change: the word בַּת was inserted into line 6 by the composer Hanina Karczewski (1877–1925) when he arranged the song for choir, because הַתִּקְוָה שְׁנוֹת אַלְפַּיִם without it was widely felt to be a solecism. It is, and lines 5–6 below are about exactly why. The text in this shape was anchored in Israeli law on 10 November 2004, in amendment no. 4 to the Flag and Emblem Law.

Every person named in that paragraph died more than seventy years ago, so the whole text is public domain and this page can print all eight lines. That is not true of every page in this group: Naomi Shemer died in 2004 and her song is still in copyright, so that page quotes two lines and no more.

How the text is set

The pointed reading below is he.wikisource's pointed text of the anthem, and the displayed line is its consonantal skeleton — classical ktiv haser, not the ktiv male used everywhere else in this guide. So the anthem's תקוה is today's תקווה, its הומיה is הומייה, its צופיה is צופייה, its חפשי is חופשי and its אלפים is אלפיים. The two spellings are never mixed inside one example: quotations keep the classical skeleton, and the modern drill sentences below are written the way an Israeli writes.

Lines 1–2: as long as, and a heart with an inside

כָּל עוֹד is a durative conjunction — "as long as", "for as long as it remains true that". It is not a time adverb and it is not "still"; it opens a subordinate clause whose truth is the condition for the main clause, and modern Hebrew uses it unchanged, alongside the more everyday כל זמן ש־.

פְּנִימָה is not the noun פְּנִים. It is that noun carrying the directional ־ָה, and it means "inward, to the inside" — the line says the heart's interior, not "the inside of the heart". Note the stress: the directional ending never takes it, so the accent stays put on the syllable in front of it — pníma, not pnimá; habáyta, not habaytá; kadíma, not kadimá. An ordinary feminine ־ָה would pull the stress onto itself (yaldá, tová), which is one more sign that this ־ָה is a different suffix.

הוֹמִיָּה looks like unknown vocabulary and is not. It is the feminine singular present participle of the ל״ה (lamed-hey) root ה־מ־ה, "to murmur, roar, yearn" — the root behind modern הֶמְיָה and הָמוֹן. Ordinary lamed-hey verbs build that participle with a plain ־ָה:

The ־ִיָּה shape is a literary variant of that same cell, and it is systematic: הוֹמָה alongside הוֹמִיָּה, צוֹפָה alongside צוֹפִיָּה, בּוֹכָה alongside בּוֹכִיָּה. Modern Hebrew keeps the plain one and reserves the long one for elevated writing — but the plain participle of this very root is alive in journalism:

Lines 3–4: the direction suffix, and a word that is not a construct

קָדִימָה is the same directional ־ָה as פְּנִימָה, on קֶדֶם ("east, front"). This is the page's practical payoff, because that suffix is not archaic at all — it is how Israelis say a whole family of everyday directions, and it replaces a preposition rather than joining one:

עַיִן, and the vowel that decides everything

Line 4 opens with עַיִן, áyin, with a patach: the ordinary free noun "eye", indefinite. The line is a verbless clause — an indefinite subject and a participle predicate, with nothing between them, because Hebrew has no present-tense copula. "An eye is gazing toward Zion."

Read it instead as עֵין, ein, with a tsere, and you have the construct form, "the eye of" — which is a different word class entirely and cannot stand alone. A construct must be followed by the thing it is bound to, so ein here would leave the sentence hanging. The unpointed spelling עין is identical for both, which is why this is worth twenty seconds of your attention:

Lines 5–6: a hope aged two thousand years

Line 5 turns Ezekiel 37:11 around word for word. There the dry bones say וְאָבְדָה תִקְוָתֵנוּ, "our hope is gone"; Imber puts עוֹד לֹא in front of the same phrase, and he.wikisource's annotation of the poem reads the line as a reply to that verse.

Line 6 is where Karczewski's one-word insertion earns its place. בַּת here is not "daughter"; it is the feminine of the appositive age marker, "aged, of the measure of". Without it, הַתִּקְוָה שְׁנוֹת אַלְפַּיִם juxtaposes a noun and a bare time phrase with nothing licensing the link. With it, שְׁנוֹת אַלְפַּיִם becomes the complement of בַּת and the whole phrase is an ordinary apposition: "the hope, [one] aged two thousand years." Modern Hebrew uses that construction constantly, for people and for things:

Note the numeral in the second one: חֲדָרִים is masculine, so it takes שְׁלוֹשָׁה with the ־ָה — Hebrew marks the masculine numeral, not the feminine.

Lines 7–8: a purpose infinitive on a bound noun

לִהְיוֹת is a bare purpose infinitive: the ל־ carries the sense "in order to" with no כדי in front of it. Modern Hebrew allows both, and inserts כדי whenever the purpose reading might not be obvious.

בְּאַרְצֵנוּ is a bound noun with a first-person plural suffix — one word doing the work of three. Everyday Israeli says בָּאָרֶץ שֶׁלָּנוּ, and this is a register difference, not a right-and-wrong one. The suffixed forms are entirely alive in formal writing:

Common Mistakes

1. Reading עַיִן as a construct. The tsere is the whole difference, and the unpointed spelling hides it.

2. Parsing פנימה as a noun. It is פְּנִים plus the directional ending, so it is an adverb and cannot head a phrase.

3. Using ל־ with a building where Hebrew wants the directional. Both strings are grammatical; only one means "home".

4. Stacking a preposition on top of the directional ending. The ־ָה is the preposition, so nothing goes in front of it.

5. Carrying the anthem's spelling into modern Hebrew. The quoted text is classical ktiv haser; what you write is not.

Key Takeaways

• The anthem is Imber's 1878 opening stanza plus a replaced second stanza; בַּת was added later by Hanina Karczewski, and the text was anchored in law in 2004. Everyone involved is long out of copyright, so the eight lines can be quoted whole.
• כָּל עוֹד is a durative conjunction, "as long as", and it is current. The everyday twin is כל זמן ש־.
• הוֹמִיָּה and צוֹפִיָּה are the literary ־ִיָּה variant of the ordinary lamed-hey feminine participle (רוֹצָה, בּוֹנָה, קוֹנָה) — recognise them, do not write them.
• The directional ־ָה in פְּנִימָה and קָדִימָה is the live suffix behind הביתה, ימינה, שמאלה, קדימה, אחורה, החוצה. It replaces a preposition; never put one in front of it, and never let it take the stress.
• עַיִן áyin is a free noun; עֵין ein is the construct. Line 4 is a verbless clause with an indefinite subject and a participle predicate.
• בַּת before a measure means "aged, of" — דירה בת שלושה חדרים, ילדה בת שלוש — and it is what makes line 6 grammatical.
• בְּאַרְצֵנוּ is a bound noun with a suffix. Modern speech says הארץ שלנו; formal writing keeps the suffix. That is register, not error.