21st Century Bible Hebrew -- "passive"

Agentless binyanim in Biblical Hebrew have had the Latin label “passive” shoehorned onto them. Their names derive, not just from their similarity to the agentive binyanim, but also to the old-fashioned notion that they are the passives of those binyanim. Instead, they have quite different connotations. 

All but one, the nifal, have the common feature that they take “oo” as the vowel of the first consonant. Like other binyanim, these inflect in aspect, person, number and gender.

The point of an agentless statement is, not who took the action, but what happened. This is very useful in law because such statements apply to everybody covered in the legal system under every administration over the centuries and millennia. Each form has a characteristic use in legal situations, and a different one if it appears in a narrative, except for nifal which, even in narratives, hints at a legal decree.

Qual. In narratives, indicates an action with important consequences later in the oral tradition. In legal material, it indicates an unexpected or counterintuitive legal directive.

Pual. In narratives, it indicates an internal denouement and also that while a specific action is important to the progress of the story, the real denouement cannot take place without some other action which is unrelated. In legal material, it indicates a situation that falls short of the definition that requires legal action, when there are multiple ways of falling short.

Hufal is a legal definition which requires applying the law; huad meaning an animal whose owner is on notice that it is dangerous and the owner is responsible under the law for further harm it causes. Very rare in narratives, it may indicate that the action follows cultural norms. Examples include hugad, information arriving from an official source.

Western grammarians used to say that “Biblical Hebrew was losing its passives”. There are two problems. First, you now know that “passive” is the label not the function of this morphology. In fact the only binyan in this group that did not survive the Babylonian Captivity was qual.

Second, western writers were not aware, and later denied, that Tannakh existed in any form except writing. I have done this to death on my blog. For now, the most important thing to remember is that, as orally transmitted material, Tannakh had to take a format that supported oral transmission. Olrik points out that orally transmitted material prefers action to description; this turns out to be true of the grammar as well as of the contents or structure. It was natural that verbs in Tannakh mostly use agentive binyanim. When it uses something else, there is always an important reason for it.

The same is true for legal material. It is a method of dealing with the actions performed by the members of the culture, and with the consequences of those actions. Descriptions, a function of “passive”, are important in legal codes, but something defined is defined forever and can then be cited in cases where different actions took place.

Arabic has similar “oo” morphology in every Form except Form VII which is cognate to Hebrew nifal, and Forms IX and X, but most Forms V and VI verbs don’t have it. They are translated as passives, as are the t-infix Forms. I’m trying to learn Arabic. I would like to hear from anybody out there with a solid understanding of Arabic who goes through the Quran and figures out if these forms really are just passives or take on meanings of their own. I already know that Latin labels have been shoehorned onto Arabic in the west, such as using “jussive” and “subjunctive” for the majzum and mansub respectively. Now I’d like to hear from somebody who has become uncomfortable thinking of the “oo” verb morphology as strictly a passive with no life of its own. I came to this realization for Biblical Hebrew pretty late; some of you Arabic scholars might have gone through the same thing.