Why isn’t the third person singular used in “The Lord bless you”?

Question

I saw the following statement within the Longman Dictionary:

The Lord bless you and keep you.

But I think it should be like below:

The Lord blesses you and keeps you.

Because The Lord is a single entity. Am I right? If not, why?

Answer 1

No, “the Lord bless you” is the subjunctive, indicating that the speaker wishes for the Lord to bless you. Changing it to “blesses” would therefore change the meaning.

Wikipedia explains that this is specifically an example of the unembedded subjunctive, giving other examples:

Subjunctive clauses can occasionally occur unembedded, with the force of a wish or a third person imperative (and such forms can alternatively be analyzed as imperatives). This is commonest nowadays in formulaic remnants of archaic optative constructions, such as "(God) bless you", "God save the Queen", "heaven forbid", "peace be with you" (any of which can instead start with may: "May God bless you", etc.); "long live…"; "truth be told", "so be it", "suffice it to say", "woe betide…", and more.

Answer 2

The Lord bless you. = May the Lord bless you.

It uses similar grammar as May..., which sounds plural, but just without the word "may".

Answer 3

The most likely source for the original quotation is one of the English translations of the Old Testament, and the most likely source for that is one of the Latin translations of the Old Testament. So for instance in the Vulgate this appears as "benedicat tibi Dominus et custodiat te," and that is a Latin hortatory subjunctive. It "encourages" someone (in this case, Dominus, otherwise known as Adonai, YHWH, or Lord) to do something. It can be used in the first person "let's do something," the second person "I hope you will do something," or third person, "may he she or it do something" in Latin.

English has a similar subjunctive, and the translators chose it here to represent the Latin, which in turn represented the Hebrew original. In modern English, the subjunctive is not used as often. It's not always obvious in modern English: in many verbs, the only difference from the indicative mood is that the singular subjunctive forms look like the plural indicative forms. That's what's happening here.

Hebrew is not an Indo-European language and it never had a subjunctive mood, so the original passage in Numbers did not have exactly this form. Translators chose to use this form to represent it, both in Latin (the Vulgate) and in this case in English, possibly influenced by a Latin text.

Some Indo-European languages have another mood, the optative. In Greek, the example I know best, this might have been translated with the optative mood. In Latin and the Germanic languages (including Old English), the optative disappeared and most of its functions were taken over by the subjunctive before any of those languages were written down.

I hope this background helps. If it is any comfort, in my experience not many native speakers of English understand how the English subjunctive works. Many of us can use it without understanding it.

I can recommend Goldman, English Grammar for Students of Latin for more on the verb systems of those to languages, and I learned Old English from Mitchell and Robinson, A Guide to Old English. For Latin I can recommend Allen and Greenough, New Latin Grammar, Bennet, New Latin Grammar, (which were "new" in the late 1800s) and Woodcock, A New Latin Syntax (1959).

Answer 4

It is a subjunctive like 'May the Lord bless you', but the omission of 'may' is intended to reflect the stronger sense of the Hebrew imperative behind the English translation. As an imperative, it is more of a request or even demand than the mere wish that 'may' would suggest.

The phrase is from English translations of the Old Testament (Numbers 6:24 to be precise), and its usage in modern times should be traced to William Tyndale's 1530 Pentateuch which was translated directly from the original Hebrew. The King James Version adopted the same wording as Tyndale in most places.

This kind of subjunctive has been used in translating both Hebrew and Greek imperatival senses into English. In both languages the source construct can have a sense stronger than a mere wish (which would be rendered in English "may he bless") but closer to a request or even demand, expressed in the third person. Another well-known example of this is the Lord's Prayer: "Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done" -- all third person imperatives in Greek.

Answer 5

Because it is the imperative form. When you give a comandand, the third person does not work as it would in other tenses. For example, you can say, "Be quiet!" "Everybody, come here!" In the subjunctive, we have the same case. I pray that he not be angry. I prayed that she go early.