אִלְמָלֵי

ביטוי (אנגלית)

If; were it so that; had it been

הגדרה (אנגלית)

If it were so that..., had it been.

(“Rav Yehuda said in the name of Rav: If Israel had kept the first Sabbath, no nation or tongue would have ruled over them… Rabbi Yohanan said in the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai: If Israel kept two Sabbaths properly, they would be immediately redeemed.” (Shabbat 118b). And similarly: “And Rabbeinu Tam says: Where there is an Aleph at the end of 'ilmale', it means ‘if not’. But where it is written with a Yud—‘ilmalei’—it means ‘if it were’.” (Tosafot Megillah 21a). And also: “And I am confident, if that generation had come to recognize the national literary value of the choice Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the sages among the ‘elite’ would have returned to ‘expound’ even these books, and the Tanakh volume would have had a fourth section.” (Bialik, The Hebrew Book))