An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

verb remains unchanged even as the Hebrew stem varies. We have already indicated
one reason for this; in the comments that follow the sentences we will give others.
1. Sarah flies (Qal) the airplane.
2. Sarah flies (Qal) tonight. / Sarah flies (Qal) off into the sky.
3. Sarah flies (Niphal) to Egypt, when Abraham offers to fly her there.[Page 356]
4. Sarah is being flown (Niphal) to Egypt.
5. Sarah flies (Niphal) to Egypt, instead of taking her mule.
6. Sarah is flying (Niphal) to Egypt in order to appeal her case to the Pharaoh.
7. Sarah is flying (Piel) the airplane in spite of the dust storm.
8. Sarah is flown (Pual) to Egypt, when the Pharaoh snaps his fingers.
9. Sarah flies (Hithpael) to Egypt.
10. Sarah flies the airplane higher (Hiphil) / causes it to fly (Hiphil) higher.
11. Sarah flew (Hiphil) higher in the airplane.
12. Sarah is made to fly (Hophal) the airplane higher.
e Sentence 1 represents the active voice with a transitive verb. Sarah is the actor or
agent, performing the action expressed by the verb. Sentence 2 also represents the
active voice. Like (1), it answers the question “What is Sarah doing?”, but unlike (1)
the verb here is intransitive. These sentences illustrate that transitive and intransitive
actions are not necessarily related to the function of voice. The Qal expresses both (1)
and (2).
f In sentence 3, Sarah is no longer the agent performing the action. Instead of
answering the question “What is Sarah doing?”, the first clause implicitly answers the
question “What is happening to Sarah?” Here Sarah is implicitly the object of the
syntactic equivalent “Abraham flies Sarah.” The intransitive verb in (3) has as its
grammatical subject the noun that would be the object of the corresponding transitive
verb. 20 In the Niphal construction the subject is not the performer of the action but
20 In some languages of the world the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of
a transitive verb take the same case, the “ergative”; the “absolutive” case is used for
the subject of a transitive verb. Such languages are called ergative languages. See
John Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1968) 351–52, 354–57. In other languages, some ergative features are
combined with standard Indo-European-type inflection (called, in this respect, an
“accusative” system); languages which are so mixed (e.g., Hindi-Urdu) are called
split-ergative languages. There were ergative languages in the ancient Near East
(Hurrian and its close relative Urartian; perhaps Sumerian), and it is not surprising to
find some signs of split ergativity in the Semitic N stems, as we shall argue below.
Ten years after our discussion was initially drafted, a parallel set of observations was
made independently by Hans-Peter Müller, “Ergativelemente im akkadischen und
althebräischen Verbalsystem,” Biblica 66 (1985) 385–417. An earlier discussion of
ergativity in Hebrew is provided by F. I. Andersen, “Passive and Ergative in
Hebrew,” Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, ed. H.
Goedicke (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1971) 1–15, who focuses chiefly on
the anomalous verb yld ‘to bear, beget.’