Commenting on ויהי (“and it came to pass”):
To understand how the KJV came to remember ויהי as “and it came to
pass,” we need to do a little dive into Hebrew grammar. In brief: what we have
here is the verb היה, “to be,” conjugated in the third person masculine singular
in the form that is typically used to mark the narrative past. So, to take an
early and easy example, we find the exact same word used just as we would use
the word “was”: “Abel was (ויהי) a keeper of sheep” (Gen 4:2). As you might imagine,
this word can just as easily be conjugated in the plural (“The two of them were
[ויהיו] naked,” Gen 2:25) or the feminine (“Sarai was [ותהי] barren,” Gen
11:30). What distinguishes these uses of ויהי from the ones under consideration
here, however, is that when used as the normal verb “was/were” there is always
a clear subject. Someone or something “was” whatever: a keeper of sheep, naked,
barren, etc.
The same word, ויהי, also appears without a subject—and it is in these
cases we find it translated in the KJV as “and it came to pass.” It’s easy
enough to see how the translators got there. After all, they were looking at
what looked just like the word “was,” but without a subject. So the subject is
rendered as the generic “it”—so, “it was.” Following the standard practice of
translating that waw at the beginning of narrative past verbs as the
word “and” (see and), they got to “and it was.” And then they basically
fancied it up: “and it came to pass.” Now they had a phrase that didn’t require
a subject, and that could thus stand all by itself in a sentence.
Two other aspects of this translation helps fill out the picture. The
first is that every time the KJV says “and it came to pass,” it comes before a
temporal clause, that is, a “when” clause.” Starting from the first appearance
of the phrase, in Genesis 4:8, the words that follow “and it came to pas” over
the next ten occurrences are as follows: “when,” “when,” “after seven days,” “at
the end of forty days,” “in the six hundredth and first year,” “as they
journeyed,” “when,” “when,” “in the days of,” “when,” and “when.” And so on for
the next three hundred-plus citations.
Even in English, then, we can see exactly how the Hebrew uses the word
ויהי: always to introduce a temporal clause. And this is, furthermore, why
modern translations are able to omit it without any confusion about the meaning
of the verse. Look at the quote in the epigraph above from Exodus 16:10. If we
take out “and it came to pass” at the beginning, the sentence still makes
perfect sense:” As Aaron spake unto the whole congregation of the children of Israel,
they looked toward the wilderness.” All we have to do is remove the word “that”
from “that they looked.” And that’s easy enough to do, since there is no “that”
in the Hebrew—it’s been added by the KJV translators to make the sentence work
with their “and it came to pass.”
What’s actually happening in the Hebrew is that ויהי is used in two
distinctive ways: one as a normal verb, “was,” and one specifically for that
purpose, to introduce a temporal clause. What’s not immediately apparent to the
English reader is that in Biblical Hebrew temporal clauses have no inherent sense,
be it past or future. In our verse, for example, the words that follow ויהי
mean, literally, “in Aaron’s speaking to the whole congregation.” The ויהי that
precedes the temporal clause is there not to have an independent meaning, “and
it came to pass,” but rather to tell us, by virtue of its base meaning of “it was,”
that the temporal clause that follows is to be set in the past. In other words,
it’s already represented in the KJV translation in the past tense of the verb “spake,”
which in the Hebrew isn’t in the past at all (it’s technically an infinitive—a form
without tense).
What is the temporal clause was supposed to refer to the future? Well,
perhaps unsurprisingly, in those cases Biblical Hebrew puts before the temporal
clause not ויהי, “it was,” but והיה, “it will be”—which the KJV renders,
equally unsurprisingly, as “and it shall come to pass” (see, e.g., Exod 3:21). (Joel
S. Baden, Lost in Translation: Recovering the Origins of Familiar Words [Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2025], 167-69)
Commenting on ו (“and”):
The same letter, however, is also used at the beginning of the most
common verbal form in Biblical Hebrew. In [Gen 1:3], “And God said,” the verb
is vayyomer, and the first letter is vav. But—despite being the
same letter used for the word “and”—it doesn’t really man “and God said.”
The vav is, in layman’s terms, the part of the verb that marks it as being
the next thing that happens in the narrative sequence. Without the vav,
what remains, yomer, would mean “he will say.” The attentive reader will
also note the doubled y: not veyomer, which is what we would
expect from the simple conjunction “and,” but vayyomer. This is no
normal “and.”
. . .
To put it another way: in Biblical Hebrew, you can’t narrate a
sequence of past events without using the verbal form that begins with a vav.
But in English, of course, you can—and, in fact, we all do, all the time. When
we tell stories, we don’t begin every sentence with “and.” We allow the
internal logic of the events to communicate the sequence. “God said, Let there
be light, and there was no light. God saw the light was good; then God
separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, while the
darkness he called Night. There was evening and there was morning, the first
day.” We don’t need “and” at the beginning of every clause to understand what
is happening. (Joel S. Baden, Lost in Translation: Recovering the
Origins of Familiar Words [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025], 52, comment
in square brackets added for clarification)
