21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 2:1, agentless verbs

Genesis 2:1

א וַיְכֻלּ֛וּ הַשָּׁמַ֥יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ וְכָל־צְבָאָֽם

Translation:     The heaven and earth were completed and all their hosts.

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יְכֻלּוּ	They were completed
צְבָאָם	Their host

All right, back on Genesis 1:26-27 I said that Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have passive binyanim, it has agentless verbs. Now that you are over the shock of what I said about nifal there, I’ll talk about agentless verbs a little more.

Typically, the first verb in this verse is called pual by which people mean the passive of piel.  Let’s analyze that.

The piel binyan has a number of uses. Mostly it is something that is known to sometimes happen, that is, frequentative, like m’daber, speak, but obviously not continuous. It can lead to expertise, hi m’daberet ivrit means “she speaks Hebrew [more or less well].”

Things that happen sometimes are sometimes the target of a law. When something only happens once, people shrug their shoulders and say “Stuff happens.” When it happens more than once, and people notice that it’s associated with a specific set of circumstances, and it has a bad outcome, that’s a reason for making a law against it. This comes out in Exodus 21 and 22, and you’ll find piel used for some verbs about the bad outcome.

A third use is an unintended effect of something that was done. The best example is in Genesis where Yitschaq sends off Yaaqov and it impacts Esav’s behavior, and I’ll discuss that in a separate post.

Now. If pual is only and always a passive of piel, then what does it mean to use it in this verse? Where is the frequentative concept behind finishing creation, or the skill that it leads to (yeah, right, Gd was in training here! – that was sarcasm), or the lack of intention? What were the bad consequences against which we need to pass a law?

The idea of passives as poor cousins of other binyanim does not work in Biblical Hebrew.

What pual does in narratives is show that a sort of denouement has been reached, but it’s not the final denouement nor is it the actual goal of the narrative. The actual goal of the narrative has not been reached until further actions occur, and they express the goal. You’ll see what they are next week.  At the same time, pual says that the actual goal could not be reached unless this internal denouement had first been accomplished.

In this situation, the material universe is the necessary condition for the real denouement of the narrative.

Also note that despite the definite nouns in this verse, there’s no et. Why? Because the grammatical subject and logical object of the verb are the same thing. That’s how agentless verbs work.

Now let’s do a reverse on the play. If pual is an internal denouement but not the final outcome, then its piel counterpart shows up in laws because the real final outcome, is sanctions for the action with the bad outcome. Piel is a verb with unintended consequences which are the actual outcome of the episode. Piel is frequentative, and the actual outcome is the expertise resulting from practice.

So they are related, but not in an obvious straightforward way for people who believe pual is the poor cousin passive of the important binyan, piel.

The most important thing this pual says historically is, that the chapter division is in the wrong place. It should be two verses after this. The division was done by a non-Jew in the 1200s CE, when the Torah culture had been up and running for at least 17 centuries – more than 20 centuries according to the archaeology. Stephen Langton wrote tons of material about the Bible, but even if he “read” Hebrew, he didn’t know or he ignored the nature of pual and he’s the one who put the chapter division where it is.

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