21st Century Bible Hebrew -- pual, hufal and ... qual

Genesis 2:1

א וַיְכֻלּ֛וּ הַשָּׁמַ֥יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ וְכָל־צְבָאָֽם

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

Now to beat up another urban legend. There’s an urban legend that during the Babylonian Captivity, “Hebrew was losing its passives.” That’s wrong in two ways.

First, as I said, there are no passives in Biblical Hebrew. There are agentless verbs. In the transition to Mishnaic Hebrew, all these binyanim survived, even the relative of qal in the set phrase v’ki yutan.  I’ll discuss an example of that binyan in Genesis 3:19 and an important one in Genesis 4:26 that shows up later in Tannakh as well.

Second, why use agentless binyanim at all? 

If you ever took a writing class, you probably remember your teacher telling you to use active verbs, especially in creative writing. (It also helps scholarly writing but the passive scholarly tradition is so pervasive it’s hard to buck.)

The same is true in oral story-telling. Torah is a record of the Jewish oral tradition. The expert in formulation of oral traditions, Axel Olrik, showed that they delineate character features by telling about the actions that the characters accomplish (or not). That uses active verbs. Oral traditions avoid describing characters, for the most part. But “passives” are inherently descriptive.  As an oral tradition, therefore, Torah would avoid using “passives” even if that is what agentless verbs are.

There has to be an important reason to use an agentless verb in Torah.  With the most frequent one, nifal, the reason is the need to express a decree, usually a Heavenly decree. The most frequent appearance of nifal, or at least the most memorable, is the phrase nikhr’tah ha-nefesh. This is a Heavenly decree of death upon a person’s descendants, wiping them out prior to his own death. The first place it shows up explicitly is in relation to circumcision in Avraham’s saga.

And I just defined the use of pual in narratives. It only shows up here because it’s important that the material universe be in place before we tell the real end of the story.

The pual and other agentless binyanim show up only when there’s no way to put the point across without them. The qual (usually called qal “passive”) is a neon sign, a sort of spoiler alert. The hufal (related to hifil) goes with behavior that fits norms on which the narrative is in some way a commentary.  It shows up in Genesis 4:15 and 4:24 in the stories of Qain and his descendant Lemekh.

So Biblical Hebrew didn’t “lose its passives.” But for the rest of this page on the blog, I’m going to lose the term passive. I’ll point out the limited number of times they appear in the rest of Parshah Breshit and later do some posts on the usage of agentless verbs in legal formulations with examples from Exodus and Leviticus.