The time has come the walrus said ...

In this post I suggest that the binyanim in Biblical Hebrew are best understood as functioning to indicate semantic roles rather than coding specific verbal elements such as voice. The semantics of each verb form is first considered, before I look briefly at the usage of the binyanim within the Old Testament text. The Qal Verb Form The Qal form of the verb is straightforward. Stative and quasi-stative verbs are conjugated for their semantic subject, and fientive verbs for their actor. For this and the the following verb forms I adopt a schematic notation to describe their semantics, with upper case letters for semantic roles and lower case for semantic relations. The Qal form of a stative verb has a subject S which is in some state denoted by s . Quasi-fientive forms, such as 'to know' may also have a theme T . Fientive verbs have an actor A and an optional patient P . The schematics for subsequent verb forms are represented in such a way that A , P and S always refe

There is widespread agreement among scholars that Biblical Hebrew (BH) has a Qal passive which was subsequently obscured by the Massoretic vocalisation. Waltke & O'Connor 1 suggest there are some 160 verb forms which are probably Qal passive, rising to nearly 200 if participles are included. The version of the parsed Hebrew Old Testament that I have lists a more conservative 81 occurrences. The textual argument has a number of components. Firstly, it is argued that some suffix conjugation (SC) forms vocalised as Pual are actually Qal passive, as the Piel/Hithpael is unattested, has a different sense, or the Piel occurs less frequently than the Pual. Likewise, some prefix conjugation (PC) forms are vocalised as Hophal, but Hiphil forms are unattested or have a different sense. This leads to some verbs having SC Pual complementing PC Hophal. Further examples of Qal passive SC forms can be found improperly vocalised as Niphal PC forms. Finally, some participles have forms that