Table of Verbal Causation in Stems
The accompanying chart serves as a "rough-and-ready" explanation of how the various stems
function in the Hebrew verbal system. There are four items to note about the chart. The first
thing to notice is the arrangement of the stems on the chart. There are—in a sense—only three
"stems" in Hebrew (represented by the three main columns): the basic stem, the state-causative
stem, and the action-causative stem. The Nifal, Pual, and Hofal types are not—in a sense—
separate stems (they do not deserve separate columns); they are simply the passive forms of the
active stems Qal, Piel, and Hifil respectively.
In English, our verbs are marked for tense: past, present, future. The past tense verb-form in the sentence, "I kicked the
ball," changes when we make the verb passive ("I was kicked by the horse."). But such a change does not make the verb
something else besides past-tense. Both "kicked" and "was kicked" are past-tense verbs...one is simply active (the
subject does the action) and one is passive (the subject is the direct object of the action). In the same way, there are only
three stems in Hebrew: Qal/Nifal, Piel/Pual/Hitpael, and Hifil/Hofal.
The second thing to notice about the chart is that there are, basically, three (what are called in
grammar-speak) "voices" in Hebrew (as there are in Gr**k): active, passive, and reflexive. In
considering the question of the relationship between the subject of a sentence and the action,
there are, in a sense, only three possibilities: the subject of the sentence can do the action, the
subject of the sentence can receive the action (i.e., the subject is really the direct-object of the
action), and the subject can do the action to himself/herself/themselves (i.e., the subject is both
the "do-er" and the direct-object). These, of course, correspond to the three rows of the chart:
Active, Passive, and Reflexive.
The third thing to notice is that not all Qal (basic, active) verbs are alike. There are "statives"
(verbs that, in their basic form, relate that the subject "is/was/will be" a certain quality; they,
therefore, do not describe true "actions" and do not take direct objects); "intrasitives" (verbs that
describe actions that do not have direct objects); and "transitives" (verbs that take direct
objects—whether the direct object is explicitly noted in the text or not). Noticing these different
qualities of verbs makes the organization of the chart conform to the way the verb stems function
in Hebrew.
The fourth and final thing to notice is the "blanks" in the chart. Because of the finite nature
of our universe, there are simply some things that are impossible....even to say...even by God!
1. Since stative and intrasitive verbs do not take direct-objects, they cannot appear in
Nifal, or Pual, or Hofal (since, in those "passive" stems, the subject of the verb is also
the direct-object.) If there is no direct-object, for the passives, there can be no subject!
2. Since a "causation-of-action" verb in which the subject is also the direct object of
both the action and the causation would looking something like: "He caused himself
to break himself," and since this is essentially the same thing as the simple Nifal, "He
broke himself," there is nothing in the lower right-hand corner.
3. While, theoretically, only transitive verbs can appear in any of the stems (Blue Verbs
appear throughout the chart), in reality there is no single verb-root that does so. In the
vast majority of cases, verbs appear only in stems that have a relationship either
"across" and/or "down" the chart. That is, verbs usually appear in only Qal, or in only
Piel,* or in only Hifil, or in Qal/Nifal, or in Qal/Piel, or Qal/Piel/Pual, or in Qal/Hifil,
or in Qal/Hifil/Hofal...but never in Qal/Hitpael/Hofal.
* For verbs that only appear in Piel and Hifil, their basic meaning is not affected by the causation inference. E.g.,
just means "he spoke"; lyDib.hi just means "he divided X".
rBeD;