[Avodah] Is "l'ahava" a verb or noun?

[Akiva Miller]

.
In learning Parshas Ekev, I came across the word "l'ahava" four times, most
famously in the Shema, in the phrase "l'ahava es Hashem Elokeichem". As far
as I could tell, *everyone" translates "l'ahava" as "to love".

My problem is that "ahava" is unambiguously a noun, while the context of
the pasuk demands a verb. Why did the Torah use this strange construction,
when it could have saved a letter by simply writing "le'ehov"?

Checking my concordances, I am forced to concede that (as my friend
listmember R' Michael Poppers put it at kiddush yesterday) I'm being too
*pre*scriptive, and insufficiently *de*scriptive. "L'ahava" is used in many
places in Tanach, and it is always used as a verb. In fact, both Mandelkern
and Even-Shoshan concordances place the verb and noun forms on different
pages, and both put "l'ahava" with the verbs, immediately after "le'ehov".

So I concede defeat. "L'ahava" is a verb. But I still want to understand
the idiom better. Can someone suggest other examples where an ostensible
noun magically turns into a verb by adding the lamed as a prefix?

Akiva Miller

PS: I am very aware of how flexible Hebrew can be. For example, "sofer" can
be either a verb (counting) or a noun (one who counts). But somehow,
"l'ahava" feels different to me, but I'm not sure why. That's why I'm
looking for other examples.

PPS: It turns out that "le'ehov" never appears anywhere in Chumash, and
only once in the rest of Tanach (that being Koheles 3:8). This fact could
be used to suggest that the Torah used "l'ahava" because "le'ehov" was not
yet in use. But that seems unlikely to me, given that another verb of the
same form - "le'echol" (to eat) - appears 14 times in the Torah (not to
mention 44 times in the rest of Tanach).

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