The sentential construction

ashrei hama'amin
`the.happiness of.the.believer'
Happy is the believer / blessed be the believer / good for the believer

has an awkward form, since it is a noun phrase which functions as a sentence. Its sentencehood is borne out by the fact that it can be embedded as an indirect content clause.

Compare, for that matter,

torxa
`your.turn'
It is your turn

to its equivalent abbreviated English form, as used in the informal spoken register

your turn.

The Hebrew form may be felicitously embedded as

ani yodea shetorxa
`I know that.your.turn'
I know that it is your turn

while in English, the sentence

*I know that your turn

is ungrammatical, and only the full sentential form may be embedded:

It is your turn
I know that it is your turn.

Constructions of this type are attested in all historical phases of Hebrew, but they have slightly different formal dimensions in each. The basic construction is identical in all phases of Hebrew, comprising an NP whose head N is the nominal predicate in smixut 'construct state' followed by a genitival NP (or suffixed possessive pronoun). The nominal predicate is evaluative (modal) and the Genitival NP is the beneficiary argument. For example, in Biblical Hebrew (BH) we have:

and the same structure may appear also in Rabbinic (RH), Medieval, and Israeli Hebrew (IH).

But there is also an extended construction, in which the judgment of happiness is expressed vis-a-vis a state of affairs encoded as a clause. In BH this is a relative clause, attached to the beneficiary argument with or without the relative particle asher `who', while in IH it represents an additional argument in the sentence, encoded as a substantivization clause, embedded by the substantivization particle she `that'. In RH the existence of the particle se can be interpreted either way, yielding a relative clause or a substantivization clause reading, as the case may be.

Despite their deviant form, these constructions constitute a subset of the xagam construction, i.e. the modal sentence, which canonically features the beneficiary argument in the dative form, as a separate argument in a nominal sentence. Note how the poetic device of Biblical parallelism makes use of both forms in the same verse: