Genesis 1:9
ט וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יִקָּווּ הַמַּיִם מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמַיִם אֶל־מָקוֹם אֶחָד וְתֵרָאֶה הַיַּבָּשָׁה וַיְהִי־כֵן:
Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim yiqavu ha-maim mi-tachat ha-shamaim el-maqom echad v’teraeh ha-yabashah va-y’hi-khen.
Translation: Gd said be the water gathered under heaven to one place and be the dry land revealed; it must have been so.
Letters in this lesson:
Vocabulary in this lesson:
יִקָּווּ
|
gather (3rd s.)
|
אֶל
|
to
|
מָקוֹם
|
place
|
תֵרָאֶה
|
appear (3rd f.s.)
|
יַּבָּשָׁה
|
dry land
|
Now we are going to have some real fun because in this verse we have two examples of the nifal binyan. If you have studied Hebrew before, you were probably taught that nifal is the “passive” of the qal. That’s not true, “passive” was just a convenient label used by western clergy in the Renaissance who were trying to pretend they knew all about Hebrew when really, they only knew Latin.
Semitic languages don’t have passive morphology. They have two situations, a structure I will call “agentless”, and another that is reciprocal. Westerners are used to translating agentless structures as passives and that’s how nifal got its designator.
What nifal really does, according to my observations, is refer to a binding legal decree.
Arabic has a comparable Form VII conjugation and, according to one of my sources, in Quranic Arabic this form has the connotation of submitting to a decree. It is not identical to nifal but it sure looks like it’s related.
Akkadian and Ugaritic had an N-stem, and Assyrian had a IV-stem, that took an “n” prefix the same as nifal and the Arabic Form VII. I have a reader of Assyrian with some examples of the IV-stem and sometimes it doesn’t even seem to have a passive meaning, but there are also verbs in Hebrew where the nifal is the only way of expressing action. Nishba, “take an oath”, is one of them.
Aramaic dropped the nifal completely at some point in its history, probably well before the Aramaeans conquered Mesopotamia. It did not re-acquire the binyan after the Aramaeans conquered Babylonia, when Aramaic and Babylonian merged. Jewish forms of Aramaic did not re-acquire it, although they adopted words like Shabbat and numerous verbs from Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew.
One take-away from this comparison is that related languages don’t function identically. If you studied more than one Germanic or Romance language, you already knew that. While studying Biblical Hebrew may be a gateway to Aramaic or Arabic, don’t expect everything to work the same or mean the same.
So that's what it does. What does it look like?
No comments:
Post a Comment