An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

picture John as he cooked the cabbage”); with a stronger causation nuance, it may
mean either ‘John made the cabbage cooked,’ in which case the cabbage is presented
as being in the “passive” state of being cooked, or ‘John caused the cabbage to cook,’
with the more[Page 355] “active” sense that the cabbage is somehow participating in
the action. Bound up with the notion of causation, there can be various degrees of
agency (“activeness”) or patiency (“passiveness”).
c Causation is expressed in many of the European languages by constructions with two
verbs. For example, German, French, and English use the auxiliary verbs ‘lessen,’
‘faire,’ ‘make/cause,’ respectively. The English auxiliaries ‘make’ and ‘cause’ tend to
introduce a suggestion of force or coercion, a notion not crucial to causation
formations, and, along with that, the similarly foreign idea that some other agent
besides the subject may be involved in the action. This is not generally so in German
and French, which tend to use their broader causation constructions more extensively.
An English verb which can be intrinsically causative, such as ‘to cook,’ avoids the
extra baggage of the causation auxiliary construction. It thus comes closer to the
morphological causation forms of Hebrew. Roughly stated, it is our proposal that the
verb ‘cooked’ in the sentence ‘John cooked the cabbage’ in the sense ‘John made the
cabbage cooked’ would be rendered in Hebrew by the Piel, and in the sense ‘John
caused the cabbage to cook’ by the Hiphil. Piel tends to signify causation with a
patiency nuance, and Hiphil causation notion with an agency nuance. The two types
of causation forms differ from one another with reference to the status of the subject
being acted upon by the main verb, that is, the voice associated with the undersubject
or secondary subject.
John cause
subject1 verb1
cabbage cook
subject2 verb2
Roughly stated, the differences between Qal, Niphal, and Hithpael, etc. (the
vertical differences in Greenberg’s diagram) refer to the voice of subject1, the primary
subject; the differences between Qal, Piel, and Hiphil, etc., refer to the voice of
subject2, where there is one. 19 We use English sentences here to suggest the stems’
differences in meaning; in the following chapters we illustrate them from Biblical
Hebrew.
d The example of English ‘to cook’ with its various senses is reminiscent of the
complexities of Hebrew verbs used in various stems. Another English verb with
similar diversity is ‘to fly,’which may be used transitively or intransitively, in similar
but varying contexts; an examination may be of heuristic value. In the following
admittedly rather far-fetched examples we have indicated in parentheses the Hebrew
verbal stem that would have been used in each instance. In most instances the English
19 The examples here are fientives; we omit statives from this preliminary discussion.