Languages from the World

of the Bible

edited by
Holger Gzella

De Gruyter

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 ISBN 978-1-934078-61-7
e-ISBN 978-1-934078-63-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Languages from the world of the Bible / edited by Holger Gzella.

  p. cm.
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN 978-1-934078-61-7 (alk. paper)
 1. Middle Eastern philology. 2. Semitic philology. 3. Middle East—Languages—
Grammar, Comparative. 4. Middle Eastern literature—Relation to the Old
Testament. 5. Middle Eastern literature—Relation to the New Testament. 6. Bible.
O.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 7. Bible. N.T. — Criticism, interpretation, etc. 
I. Gzella, Holger, 1974 –
 PJ25L36 2011
 492—dc23   2011038199

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© 2012 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin

© Original edition „Sprachen aus der Welt des Alten Testaments“ 2009 by WBG
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 Ancient Hebrew
Holger Gzella

1. Introduction and language history

Until the gradual emergence of Semitic epigraphy from the middle of the
eighteenth century on, Hebrew was only known from manuscripts con-
taining biblical and rabbinic texts. However, the language, too, reflects
the long and complicated history of the Hebrew Bible with its organic
growth and its many redactional layers. Even the received text, which
has been transmi ed since the canon was completed and which under-
lies the Codex Leningradensis from 1008 ce, the most authoritative manu-
script, went through the hands of countless scribes, echoing their voices
as well. For the purpose of synagogal recitation, scholars (“Masoretes”)
indicated the traditional pronunciation of the erstwhile almost purely
consonantal text by means of a very precise system of vowel signs, ac-
cents, and other diacritical marks. They accompany the consonantal
skeleton but also exhibit, besides ancient features, several instances
of later linguistic development. In Western grammatical tradition, the
pointing of the Masoretes from Tiberias in Galilee has become normative
and dominates the teaching of Biblical Hebrew since the first Christian
textbook, De rudimentis Hebraicis (published in 1506) by Johannes Reuch-
lin (1455–1522). The exact pronunciation, by contrast, toward which this
system is geared, has been lost and must be reconstructed on the basis
of Medieval sources like the works of Jewish grammarians. None of the
present reading traditions with their many ramifications exactly corre-
sponds to the Tiberian one. Hence its origin is very difficult to trace.
Already in the nineteenth century, grammarians endeavored to
“sweep away the dust of the ages” by reconstructing, with the help of
Classical Arabic (which is typologically more conservative), the pre-Exilic
stage of Hebrew lurking behind the vocalization. Meanwhile, however,
a fair number of inscriptions in Hebrew as well as in closely related idi-
oms have become known, and other pronunciation traditions (Babylo-
nian, Yemenite, Samaritan, etc.) have been investigated more thoroughly.
Although the traditional, cumulative, identification of Ancient Hebrew
with the biblical text in its received form continues to linger on, it is

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 Ancient Hebrew 77

somewhat easier now to situate this language within a broader matrix of

Canaanite and Aramaic varieties used throughout ancient Syria-Palestine
and to understand the considerable amount of linguistic variation in the
biblical corpus in historical, geographical, and stylistic respects: First, ar-
chaic poetry (Gen 49; Ex 15; the Balaam oracles in Num 22–24; Deut 32,
33; Jdg 5; 1 Sam 2; 2 Sam 1, 22 = Ps 18; 2 Sam 23; Ps 68; Hab 3) draws heav-
ily on the conventions of a traditional poetic language which has also le
its mark in Ugaritic epic. Classical Hebrew, the subsequent developmen-
tal stage, is the linguistic register in which the literary prose corpus and
some epigraphic witnesses have been composed. In post-Exilic writings
(1–2 Chr, Ezr, Neh, Esth, Dan, and others), a growing degree of Aramaic
influence can be observed due to the impact of Achaemenid administra-
tion. Although Classical prose remained in use as a prestigious literary
style, Aramaic gradually replaced Hebrew as the pragmatically domi-
nant language in daily life during the la er half of the first millennium
ce. Moreover, some literary genres (e.g., philosophical discourse) use
particular registers that partly seem to continue archaic dialects. In light
of epigraphic sources, too, a basic distinction can be established between
a Northern dialect (“Israelite”), a ested by ostraca from Samaria before
the fall of the Northern kingdom in 722 ce and some reflexes in the bib-
lical text, and a Southern variant (“Judean”) which underlies Classical
Hebrew. Yet already in early biblical texts, it is o en hard to distinguish
dialectal “Northernisms” from the influence of Transjordanian idioms
or Aramaic. Some passages even seem to consciously switch between
different styles (e.g., “foreigner talk”). As a literary language, South-
ern Hebrew appears to have already spread to the northern part of the
speech area early in the first millennium. The discoveries from the Dead
Sea further enrich this abundance and also appear to contain, besides
“classicizing” texts, predecessors of Rabbinic Hebrew.
Unlike many other grammatical surveys, the present chapter focuses
in particular on the pre-Exilic inscriptions through the lens of historical
reconstruction. The most complete and detailed edition of the epigraphic
corpus has been published by Renz and Röllig (1995–2003), whose sigla
(consisting of the place of provenance and the century of composition)
are used here; a serviceable English collection especially geared toward
students of the Bible has been prepared by Dobbs-Allsopp, Robert,
Seow, and Whitaker (2004). Finally, KAI contains a selection of Hebrew
documents as well. The dictionary by Ho ijzer and Jongeling (1995) also
includes the lexicon of the Hebrew inscriptions with full bibliography;
the comprehensive 18th edition of Gesenius’s dictionary (1987–2010) in-
corporates the epigraphic material in the respective articles on Biblical
Hebrew words. Due to the emphasis on pre-Exilic Judean prose in this

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 78 Holger Gzella

chapter, the most important, reasonably homogeneous, variety of An-

cient Hebrew clearly comes to the fore. Linguistic developments that
gradually led to the evolution of Tiberian Hebrew, however, are also
considered; especially with divergent forms, a transcription of the Tibe-
rian pointing is given in parentheses. For an exhaustive and up-to-date
grammar of Biblical Hebrew, readers may refer to Joüon and Muraoka
(2006); Blau (2010) discusses at least phonology and morphology in great
detail and assembles much comparative material. The works by Bauer
and Leander (1922) and Bergsträsser (1919–1929) are, unfortunately, in-
complete and partly outdated but have not yet been replaced due to their
historical-comparative scope and depth.

2. Writing

When Hebrew was elevated to the status of official idiom of a newly-

emerging administration, scribes in Israel and its vicinity also took over
the prestigious Phoenician alphabetic writing with its twenty-two le er
signs. In the course of time, a “national” variant of this script evolved.
The so-called “Square Script,” with which since Achaemenid times
(ca. 550–330 bce) Hebrew has been wri en, and later other Jewish lan-
guages like Yiddish as well, originates from an Aramaic variety of the
alphabetic script fine-tuned for use in chanceries. It had marginalized
and eventually replaced the local alphabet when Persian administration
took over. Here is a comparison of the le ers in square script, pre-Exilic
Ancient Hebrew writing, and the usual signs in Latin transliteration:
ʾ; B; G; D; ‫ ה‬H; ‫ ו‬W; ‫ז‬ Z; Ḥ ; Ṭ ; ‫ י‬Y; (at the
end of a word: ‫ )ך‬K; ‫ ל‬L; ‫( מ‬at the end of a word: ‫ )ם‬M; ‫( נ‬at the end
of a word: ‫ )ן‬N; ‫ ס‬S; ʿ; (at the end of a word: ) P; (at the end of
a word: ‫)ץ‬ Ṣ ; Q; ‫ ר‬R; ‫ש‬ Š; ‫ ת‬T. The Hebrew script seems
to have acquired considerable local prestige, such that its use extended
to the Philistine costal cities in the West (to the effect that it is debated
whether the inscriptions from these cities were composed in a local vari-
ant or in Hebrew) and to the Transjordanian area in the East.
Contrary to Phoenician, but like Aramaic, certain consonant le ers
could also indicate long vowels in Hebrew writing (“plene spelling”).
These vowel le ers, traditionally labeled matres lectionis, o en evolved
from historical spellings or graphic analogies and were at first confined
to word-final position: H for /-ā/ (ʾMH /ʾammā/ ‘cubit’), /-ε̄/ (DWH
/dawε̄/ ‘ill’), and /-ō/ (KTBH /katabō/ ‘he wrote it’); W for /-ū/ (WYLKW
/wa-yalikū/ ‘and then they went’), but only since post-Exilic times instead
of H for /-ō/; Y for /-ī/ (ʾNY /ʾanī/ ‘I’). By contrast, Lʾ /lō/ ‘not’ and Nʾ /nā/

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 Ancient Hebrew 79

‘please’ do not employ genuine vowel le ers but result from historical
orthography which could also have been preserved for disambiguation
and prevented confusion with LH /lō/ ‘to him’ and the suffixed energic in
-NH. At a later stage, W sometimes rendered word-medial /-ō-/ and /-ū-/,
similarly Y for word-medial /-ē-/ and /-ī-/. In such positions, however,
their use remained optional; hence plene spellings and writings without
vowel le ers (“defective spelling”) occur side by side even during the
same period (as with ʾŠ and ʾYŠ for /ʾīš/ ‘man’). The Dead Sea Scrolls, in-
cluding the biblical manuscripts from the Judean Desert, clearly indicate
that the use of matres lectionis greatly increased a er the Babylonian Exile
in some scribal schools. The frequent variation between plene and defec-
tive spelling in the more conservative Masoretic text is a result of its long
history of transmission and by and large does not follow specific rules.

3. Phonology

3.1. Consonants

The inventory of consonants in Hebrew reflects some sound changes in

common with other Canaanite languages like Phoenician. It comprises
at least 23 phonemes: that is the voiced and unvoiced laryngeals /ʾ/ (glot-
tal stop) and /h/; the pharyngeal fricatives /ʿ/ (glo alic pressure sound)
and /ḥ/ (whose pronunciation is in between ch in German ach, or Sco ish
loch, and plain h); the velars /g/ and /k/; the sibilants /z/ and /s/; the den-
tals /d/ and /t/; the bilabials /b/ and /p/; and the unvoiced palatovelear /š/
(as in ship). Additionally, /k/, /s/, and /t/ have “emphatic” counterparts
commonly transliterated /q/, /ṣ /, and /ṭ /. Their pronunciation in Ancient
Hebrew is not entirely clear; perhaps they were at first glo alized, that
is, doubly articulated with a subsequent glo al stop, with /ṣ / also being
affricated ([tsʾ]), but they may have been pharyngealized or velarized
(with a following /ʿ/) at a later stage, as in Arabic vernaculars. In mod-
ern traditions, like Israeli Hebrew and Western academic pronunciation,
they have been simplified to [k], [ts] and [t]; this is o en a ributed to
European influence since the Middle Ages. The liquids /l/ and /r/ (whose
articulation may have been rolled as in Spanish r or uvular as in French)
also have phonemic status, as do the nasals /m/ and /n/ as well as the
semivowels (glides) /y/ (palatal) and /w/ (bilabial, first pronounced as in
water, but in later Tiberian mostly as in very). The lateral /ś/ (containing an
[l]-sound, hence Hebrew bóśεm ‘balsam’ corresponds to Gk. 7UAH6BDC)
was also preserved in the earliest stage. However, it had to be wri en
with Š, since the Phoenician alphabet did not include a separate le er

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 80 Holger Gzella

sign for it; only later did the Masoretes graphically distinguish between
‫ שׂ‬and ‫ שׁ‬by means of a diacritical dot. Nonstandard phonetic spellings
(e.g., in the Dead Sea Scrolls) indicate that /ś/ later merged with /s/, as it
did in contemporaneous Aramaic.
Many Greek transcriptions of names in the Pentateuch according
to the Septuagint version show that the original distinctions between
*/ḫ/ (as in German ach) and */ḥ/, both spelled with Ḥ , and between */ġ/
(spirantized g, as in Modern Greek) and */ʿ/, graphically rendered with
ʿ, were known at least until the third century bce. The reason is that */ḫ/
and */ġ/ are transcribed with 8 and <, whereas vowels are used for */ḥ/
and */ʿ/: hence YṢ Ḥ Q and #H66@ ‘Isaac’ for /ḥ/, but Ḥ RN and 6GG6C
‘Harran’ for */ḫ/; likewise, ʿZH and !6N6 ‘Gaza’ for */ġ/, yet ʾLYʿZR and
A>:N:G ‘Eliezer’ for */ʿ/. However, it is difficult to determine whether the
distinct pronunciation of these sounds also points to distinct phonemic
status, or whether the transcription practice of the Septuagint merely re-
flects a learned archaism which may have been confined to liturgical rec-
itation (similar perhaps to the Late Medieval pronunciation [ˈmɔːdlɪn]
preserved in the name of the institution Magdalen College in Oxford
instead of [ˈmægdəlɪn] according to the modern pronunciation of the
corresponding personal name).
All phonemic consonants, including, at least until shortly a er the
Babylonian Exile, the gu urals, could be lengthened, although they were
articulated only once even then (like geminates in Italian: ecco, spesso,
etc.) and hence appear as simple consonants in writing. Some peculiari-
ties between them and /r/ (whose similarity to the gu urals may point
to a uvular pronunciation at some stage) which are characteristic of the
Tiberian pointing thus presumably result from later developments. The
same applies to the double pronunciation of the “Begadkefat,” on which
see below. Medieval grammars mention a number of other idiosyncrasies
of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition (e.g., a “hard,” i.e. unaspirated,
[p] in ʾappadnō ‘his palace’ Dan 11:45), but these are all extremely difficult
¯
to date.

3.2. Vowels

One can a empt to reconstruct a stage of the Ancient Hebrew vowel sys-
tem predating the Tiberian vocalization with the help of various bits and
pieces of information: matres lectionis in consonantal texts; transcriptions
mostly in Greek or Latin le ers (chiefly names in the ancient versions of
the Bible and the fragments of the Secunda, the second column of a poly-
glot edition with a contemporary rendering of the Hebrew text in Greek

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 Ancient Hebrew 81

script prepared by Origen, who died in 254 ce); later pointing traditions;
and historical-comparative philology. However, because of the limited
corpus, considerable diversity in the sources, the long period of a esta-
tion, and the coexistence of several Hebrew varieties and pronunciation
traditions, this method does not lead to uncontested results. At best, one
can suggest a tentative relative chronology of some important sound
changes.
It is fairly safe to assume that the Proto-Semitic long vowels */ī/ and
*/ū/ generally remained stable through the ages. Original */ā/ regularly
shi ed to /ɔ̄/, an open /o/ sound distinct from the likewise secondary
closed /ō/, as it did, albeit over a longer period of time, in other Canaan-
ite languages. According to the Tiberian pronunciation, secondary /ā/
(which resulted from tonic or pretonic lengthening) was also backed to
/ɔ/, perhaps around 500 ce but in any case a er the Secunda. Yet many
later traditions restored the pronunciation as [ā], so this is how it o en ap-
pears in transcriptions. Since H never serves as a mater lectionis for /ī/, the
lowering of stressed stem-final /-ī/ to /-ε̄/, an open /e/ sound as in English
bed (German long ä as in spät) distinct from closed /e/, took place, according
to spellings like DWH /dawε̄/ (< */dawī/) ‘ill’, already in pre-Exilic times.
The reflexes of the etymological short vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/, by con-
trast, were subject to far-reaching changes, especially (if certain basic
historical assumptions prove correct) in the post-Exilic period. In pro-
nunciation, /i/ except before /y/ was usually realized as a closed short [e]
and /u/ except before /w/ as a closed short [o], for the respective length-
ening grades in tonic or pretonic syllables regularly appear as /ē/ and
/ō/ in later pointings. Both are weaker than /a/. Short ε as in English bet,
which has its own sign in the Tiberian vocalization, also seems to have
emerged only in the post-Exilic period but its phonemic status is not
entirely clear. As a consequence, the Tiberian system, the most precise
Semitic vocalization tradition, distinguishes seven vowel qualities: i (ִ),
e (ֵ), ε (ֶ), a (ַ), ɔ (ָ), o (ֹ, ‫)וֹ‬, u (ֻ, ‫)וּ‬. There seems to be growing agree-
ment that the Tiberian vowel signs do not mark vowel length, but such
information can be supplied, to varying degrees of certainty, on histori-
cal grounds. (The inherited distinction between long and short vowels
collapsed in later stages of Hebrew and plays no role in the modern
language, although it is hard to say when exactly that happened.)
Etymological diphthongs, on the other hand, exhibit variation al-
ready in the earliest directly a ested stages of Hebrew. In the Northern
dialect, as in Ugaritic and Phoenician, */aw/ and */ay/ had already been
consistently monophthongized to /ō/ and /ē/ respectively when the or-
thography was standardized (cf. YN /yēn/ < */yayn/ ‘wine’ in ostraca from
Samaria). At a somewhat later period, but presumably before the sixth

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 82 Holger Gzella

century bce, they seem to have undergone gradual monophthongization

in Southern Hebrew too but were o en preserved in spelling (as in YYN
for ‘wine’ in epigraphic documents from Judea). Hence W and Y almost
automatically developed into vowel le ers for /ō/ and /ē/ as time went
by. According to the Tiberian pointing, however, diphthongs were o en
expanded into triphthongs when stressed: báyit < */bayt/ ‘house’, mɔ́wεt
¯ < */yawm/ ‘day’. An-¯
< */mawt/ ‘death’, but, for unknown reasons, yōm
cient triphthongs, by contrast, had been monophthongized already in the
earliest texts.

3.3. Stress and syllable structure

Comparative evidence, especially from Phoenician, suggests that short

unstressed word-final vowels disappeared in Canaanite, and presum-
ably in Northwest Semitic in general, shortly a er 1000 bce. As a con-
sequence, stress fell on the last syllable in most Hebrew words, but the
Masoretes indicate regular penultimate stress in some grammatical
forms (in general, certain endings and suffixes). According to the Tibe-
rian pointing, stress was phonemic, as is evidenced by minimal pairs
like the 3fem.sg. “perfect” / bā́ʾā/ ‘she came’ vs. the fem.sg.abs. participle
/ bāʾā́ / ‘coming’. No phonemic stress can be unambiguously demonstrated
for older phases of Northwest Semitic.
The inherited syllable structures are /CV/, /CVC/, and presumably
also /CCVC/. The la er, if accepted, is etymological in a few individual
words like the numeral ‘two’ and the original form of the G-stem imper-
ative according to the least problematic reconstruction. Loss of the case
endings in the singular then produced the secondary pa ern /CVCC/,
with a word-final consonant cluster, which was, however, resolved by
means of an anaptyctic vowel (its symbol named sεḡōl) at a later stage,
hence */kalb-u/ > /kalb/ > Tiberian kέlεḇ ‘dog’. For the same reason, the
so-called “segolates” in Tiberian Hebrew (i.e., nouns conforming to the
original pa erns qaṭ l, qiṭ l, and quṭ l) kept their stress on the first sylla-
ble in the singular. Closed syllables with a long vowel were avoided. At
the end of an intonation unit, short vowels in an open penultimate or
final syllable could be (slightly) lengthened (“pause”).

3.4. Sound changes in Ancient Hebrew

The common Northwest Semitic shi of word-initial */w-/ to /y-/ (ex-

cept in /wa-/ ‘and’ and a few other words) and assimilation of /n/ to the

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 Ancient Hebrew 83

immediately following consonant are also operative in Hebrew. At least

in the received consonantal text, however, root-final /n/, excluding the
frequent verb ntn ‘to give’, has been restored due to paradigm pressure
(e.g., zāqantā ‘you have become old’). Also, /n/ in contact with another
consonant as well, tends to be preserved before laryngeals as well, as in
the G-stem “imperfect,” e.g., yinḥal ‘he inherits’ (comparable examples
exist in other Northwest Semitic languages, too).
Early loss of syllable-final glo al stops with compensatory lengthen-
ing of the preceding vowel is also a ested in other Semitic languages
and seems to have occurred in Canaanite already in the Late Bronze Age.
Despite the age of this sound change in early Canaanite material, how-
ever, the glo al stop is o en preserved in spelling in Hebrew. The cor-
responding lengthening grades are /ā/ for */a/, /ē/ for */i/ (presumably
due to its pronunciation as [e]), and /ō/ for */u/ (presumably because it
sounded like [o] in pronunciation), hence */raʾš-/ > */rāš/ > /rōš/ ‘head’,
spelled RʾŠ. Some exceptions in the Tiberian pointing seem to result from
hypercorrect vocalizations, e.g., zʾēḇ ‘wolf’ for expected *zēḇ (< */ðiʾb/).
As in Aramaic, metathesis o en occurs with a root-initial sibilant
and the /t/ of a prefix that would immediately precede the sibilant.
Voiced sibilants and “emphatics” also trigger partial voicing assimila-
tion (i.e., */ts/ > /st/, but */tz/ > /zd/ and */tṣ / > /ṣ ṭ /). A peculiar feature
of Hebrew, by contrast, is the assimilation of /h/ to /t/, especially with
suffixes on 3fem.sg. “perfects” (e.g., */gamalat-hū/ > /gamala ū/ ‘she
weaned him’, a phenomenon not yet clearly a ested in pre-Exilic times);
the assimilation of */dt/ > / /, on the other hand, appears but rarely in
writing (e.g., with the feminine numeral ‘one’), although it may have
been more common in pronunciation (unless one assumes that a helping
vowel appeared in such cases and that a form like /ʾaḥadtī/ ‘I took’ was
pronounced [ʾaḥadətī]).

3.5. The path to Tiberian Hebrew

Other sound changes that give Tiberian Hebrew its distinctive shape
among the “classical” Semitic languages and also form the basis of Mod-
ern Hebrew seem to have become operative only, sometimes considerably,
a er the Babylonian Exile. They can be a ributed to language-internal
developments, imperfect learning a er the gradual erosion of the Judean
standard language, and Aramaic substrate pronunciation:
– Especially with nominal forms (including the participle), an etymo-
logical short vowel in the tonic syllable was replaced by its corre-
sponding lengthening grade, i.e., */a/ > /ā/, */i/ > /ē/, */u/ > /ō/. Many

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 84 Holger Gzella

scholars a ribute this phenomenon to an erroneous use of pausal

forms in context, owing to increasing influence of Aramaic (which
does not have special forms for pausal intonation), although length-
ening under stress occurs fairly automatically in many languages.
Medieval grammarians, too, remark that all stressed vowels, even
etymologically short ones, were pronounced longer than unstressed
vowels. Nonetheless, others date tonic lengthening to a much earlier
period. Since the pointing does not express length, this phenomenon
is sometimes also referred to as “backing” or “lowering.”
– Word-final long consonants were simplified and plosive stops spi-
rantized, compare the etymological form */libb/ ‘heart’ with Tiberi-
an lēḇ. Only rarely does analogy prevent spirantization, as with ʾat <
/ʾa / < /ʾa ī/ ‘you (fem.sg.)’ under the influence of the corresponding
plural form.
– Word-final consonant clusters, by contrast, were regularly resolved
by an auxiliary vowel which appears as an unstressed ε in the Ti-
berian pointing (a with gu urals) and which seems to have caused
assimilation of */a/ in the preceding syllable. This phenomenon
is usually called “segolization”, as in */malk/ > */málək/ > mέlεḵ.
Original */i/ and */u/ in the first syllable appear as [e] and [o] in
the vocalization. Inconsistencies in the rendering of these auxiliary
vowels in Septuagint transcriptions and in Origenʾs Secunda point
to their nonsystemic nature.
– At least in some parts of the speech area, especially in Samaria and
Northern Galilee, the gu urals /ʾ/ and /ʿ/, as well as /r/ (which would
have been similar to these in pronunciation if one assumes a uvu-
lar or voiceless articulation like French r), were weakly articulated,
presumably from ca. 200 bce on at the latest. Hence lengthening
them became impossible and yielded to compensatory lengthening
of the preceding vowel. This change is reflected in the difference be-
tween the etymologically correct transcription of the personal name
-6GG6 (< */śarrat-/ ‘princess’) in the Septuagint Pentateuch (ca. mid
3rd c. bce) and the Tiberian vocalization Śārā. Weak articulation
somewhat later also targeted /h/ and /ḥ/ but did not cause compen-
satory lengthening there. The Masoretes indicated the presence of
fleeting auxiliary vowels like the pataḥ furtivum with etymological
gu urals in syllable-final position (hence rūaḥ for */rūḥ/ ‘wind’). A
root-final gu ural triggers the shi */i/ > /a/.
– The non-emphatic plosive stops developed fricative allophones, in
all likelihood via an aspirated pronunciation when in weak articu-
lation (i.e., usually following a vowel) and not lengthened: /b/:: /ḇ/

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 Ancient Hebrew 85

(labiodental v as in very), /g/ :: /ḡ/, /d/ :: /d/ (like th in this), /k/: /ḵ/, /p/
¯
:: /p̄/ (= f), and /t/ :: /t / (like th in thin). Since ḡ was pronounced like
¯
older */ġ/ and /ḵ/ like */ḫ/, this change normally presupposes that
the mergers of */ġ/ and /ʿ/ and of */ḫ/ and /ḥ/ had been completed. As
the Septuagint Pentateuch still preserves reflexes of a distinct pro-
nunciation of */ġ/ and */ḫ/ (see Section 3.1), the appearance of these
spirantized allophones is unlikely to have taken place before the
third century bce. It may be a ributed to the influence of Aramaic
pronunciation, for only Hebrew and Aramaic consistently spiran-
tize all six stops /b g d k p t/ (comparable phenomena in other Se-
mitic languages target only some of them). The Tiberian Masoretes
indicate the plosive variants of these so-called “Begadkefat” sounds
by means of a dot (dagesh) in the le er. Especially European pronun-
ciation traditions ignore the allophones /ḡ/ and /d/, o en also /t /,
¯
whereas the Yemenite reading tradition preserves ¯all six of them.

– Once short unstressed vowels in open syllables could no longer be

articulated (arguably a constraint borrowed from Aramaic), they
were either lengthened or reduced. The Tiberian pointing marks
the absence of a vowel, including an original short vowel, by shwa
(ְ). In pronunciation, however, a nonsyllabic short auxiliary vowel
appeared, which, being an allophone of zero (so to speak), is not
transcribed here. The appearance of such an auxiliary vowel may
also have been governed by the phonetic environment, especially
the sonority of the consonants involved, since a word-initial cluster
like /tr/ with sounds of an increasing degree of sonority is much
easier to pronounce than a cluster like /mq/ with a decrease in so-
nority. Byforms with a prothetic glo al stop (zrōaʿ and ʾεzrōaʿ ‘arm’)
would at any rate point to word-initial consonant clusters. Fleet-
ing, likewise nonsystemic and thus nonfunctional, vowels with
gu urals are indicated by the ḥaṭ ef signs in the vocalization (i.e., a
combination of the symbol for a short vowel and shwa), transcribed
with superscript le ers here. It is also quite reasonable to assume
that word-initial /y/ and /w/ were pronounced [i] and [u] a er a
following short vowel had disappeared. Vowel reduction, which
eventually resulted in vowel deletion, may have taken place gradu-
ally during a longer period of time; evidence like the disappearance
of matres lectionis for certain short vowels in some epigraphic docu-
ments suggests that it was completed by the middle of the third
century ce in Aramaic, but its onset in Hebrew is difficult to date.

– Tiberian Hebrew has many instances of an interchange between */i/

and */a/, but the exact circumstances cannot always be determined

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 86 Holger Gzella

precisely. The frequent, though not entirely consistent, shi */i/ >
/a/ in closed stressed syllables (e.g., zāqántā ‘you have become old’,
from */zaqínta/), commonly referred to as “Philippi’s Law,” was
apparently not yet operative in the transcriptions given by Origen
around 250 ce. Its counterpart, the likewise unsystematic change
*/a/ > /i/ (pronounced [e]) in unstressed closed syllables, does not
appear in ancient transcriptions either. Admi edly, many examples
occur in names and may thus not be representative for living use
(e.g., the Tiberian pointing consistently has */magdál/ > miḡdā́l
‘tower’, but the original form still features in New Testament
transcriptions of the name '6<96A=Cή ‘Magdalene’).
– Some alleged exceptions to the “Canaanite Shi ” */ā/ > /ō/, in par-
ticular in names of professions according to the qaṭ ṭ āl pa ern (such
as dayyān ‘judge’), but also in the “perfect” of “hollow roots” (e.g.,
qām ‘he stood’) and verbs ending in a vowel (like the second ā in
bānā ‘he built’) are difficult to explain and thus hard to date. It seems
impossible to decide with certainty whether these must count as
archaisms, as interdialectal borrowings, as analogical formations
(at least in verbal forms), or as more recent developments caused
by the influence of Aramaic (where etymological */ā/ apparently
remained stable during the period in question).

4. Morphology and morphosyntax

4.1. Personal pronouns

Personal pronouns occur as independent words and as suffixes, which

are grammatical morphemes a ached to nouns, prepositions, and verbs.
They distinguish three persons, masculine and feminine gender (except
in the first person), and singular and plural number. Independent per-
sonal pronouns generally express the subject in nominal clauses with
equational (‘A is B’) or prepositional (‘A is in/by/at/with etc. B’) expres-
sions. Finite verbs, on the other hand, already encode the subject; here
the use of an independent personal pronoun reinforces the subject or
highlights a contrast. Only a few forms are a ested in pre-Exilic inscrip-
tions; for comparative purposes, the reconstructed persons, together
with their immediate ancestors and the corresponding Tiberian spellings
in parentheses, are also added (Table 1 and below).
The problem of the quantity of the final vowels in these forms,
which apparently combine properties of short and long vowels, is briefly

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 Ancient Hebrew 87

Table 1. Hebrew independent personal pronouns

Singular Plural

1 ʾNY /ʾanī/ (ʾ nī, ʾānōḵī)

a
NḤ NW /naḥnū/ ((ʾa)náḥnū)
2masc. ʾT /ʾa ā/ (< */ʾantā/ ʾat(tā)) — /ʾa im/ (< */ʾantumū/ ʾa εm)
2fem. — /ʾa ī/ (< */ʾantī/ ʾat) — /ʾa innā/ (<*/ʾantinnā/ ʾa en(ā))
3masc. HWʾ /hū(ʾ)/ (< */hūʾa/ hū) — /him(ā)/ (< */humū/ hem(mā))
3fem. — /hī(ʾ)/ (< */hīʾa/ hī) — /hinnā/ (hennā)

discussed in the chapter on Phoenician. Several shorter and longer by-

forms coexist in the Masoretic text (including, e.g., a reflex of the old
2fem.sg. form /ʾa ī/, spelled ʾTY but vocalized ʾat) and other traditions
like the Dead Sea Scrolls (e.g., a 2masc.pl. /ʾa immā/, pa erned a er
the 2fem.pl., in Qumran manuscripts and in the Samaritan tradition of
Hebrew). They seem to result from both ancient dialectal distinctions
and more recent workings of analogy. Many developments, such as
the leveling of the /i/ vowel in the second and third persons plural, are
therefore difficult to date.
Pronominal suffixes, by contrast, indicate a pronominal possessor
or relation when a ached to nouns in the construct state and to preposi-
tions; with transitive verbs, they express a pronominal direct object. The
so-called “singular suffixes” appear with a base ending in a consonant
and take a linking vowel, mostly /a/ (o en identified with the ancient
accusative case in the singular and then extended by analogy); forms of
the “imperfect” and the imperative without afformatives, on the other
hand, take the linking vowel /i/ or an “energic” ending /-an/: -Y /-ī/ ‘my
(masc./fem.)’ (with verbs: -NY /-nī/ ‘me’), -K(H) /-ak(ā)/ (-ḵā, in pause
-ḵā) ‘your (masc.)’, -K(Y) /-ak(ī)/ (-ēḵ) ‘your (fem.)’, -H (later -W) /-ō/
(usually explained as from */-á-hū/ with loss of intervocalic /h/) ‘his’,
-H(H/ʾ) /-ahā/ (-āh) ‘her’, -NW /-anū/ (-ēnū) ‘our (masc./fem.)’, -KM(H)
/-akim(ā)/ (-ḵεm) ‘your (masc.pl.)’, -KN(H) /-akin(nā)/ (-ḵεn) ‘your (fem.
pl.)’, -(H)M(H) (rarely -MW /-amū/) /-a(hi)mā/ (-ām) ‘their (masc.)’, -(H)
N(H) /-a(hi)nnā/ (-ān) ‘their (fem.)’. Tiberian ē in the 2fem.sg. and 1pl.,
and ε in the pausal 2masc.sg., could reflect an old genitive */-i/ or a
borrowing from vowel-final bases.
Vocalic bases of the construct state in the masculine plural and dual
as well as singular forms and prepositions ending in a vowel, by con-
trast, do not require a linking vowel. This produced a different set of
forms which also occur with feminine plurals in Hebrew (o en except-
ing the third person): -Y /-ayy/ (-ay) ‘my (masc./fem.)’, -(Y)K(H) /-ēkā/
(-ḵā) ‘your (masc.sg.)’, -YK(Y) /-ēkī/ (-áyiḵ) ‘your (fem.sg.)’, -(Y)H(W)

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 88 Holger Gzella

or /-ēhū/ or (with loss of intervocalic /h/) -(Y)W /-ēw/ (-āw) ‘his’, -(Y)H
/-ēhā/ (-hā) ‘her’, -(Y)NW /-ēnū/ ‘our (masc./fem.)’, -(Y)KM(H) /-ēkimā/
(-ēḵεm) ‘your (masc.pl.)’, -(Y)KN(H) /-ēkinnā/ (-ēḵεn) ‘your (fem.pl.)’,
-(Y)HM(H) /-ēhimā/ (-ēhεm) ‘their (masc.)’ (fem.pl. nouns mostly take
the corresponding singular suffix, e.g. ʾarṣ ōtām ‘their lands’), -(Y)HN(H)
/-ēhinnā/ (-ēhεn) ‘their (fem.)’ (but usually¯with the corresponding sin-
gular suffix in the fem.pl.). At a somewhat later stage, graphic analogy
restored the etymological writing -Y- (for /-ē-/ < */-ay-/) for the 3masc.
sg. plural suffix, since -W was by then used for the singular suffix /-ō/
(compare ʾNŠW ‘his men’ in KAI 193:18 with ʾNŠYW, pointed ʾanāšāw, in
1 Sam 23:8 and elsewhere). Tiberian Hebrew replaced the closed /ē/ of
the plural construct ending before /-ā/, then pronounced as an open ɔ̄, by
a likewise open ε̄.

4.2. Demonstrative pronouns

Early inscriptions a est only the masculine singular ZH /zε̄/ (< */d ī/, a
fossilized genitive of an earlier determinative-relative pronoun) and ¯ its
feminine counterpart ZʾT /zōt/ (< */daʾt/; the variant /zō/, rare in the He-
brew Bible but common in Rabbinic¯ Hebrew, is as yet una ested in the
epigraphic corpus) of the near-deictic demonstrative pronoun (‘this’). It
is, however, very likely that the common masculine and feminine plural
form was /ʾi(l)lε̄/ (< */ʾi(l)lī/?), which underlies Tiberian ʾellε̄ (:AA: and
:A= in ancient transcriptions). The Rabbinic Hebrew variant ʾellū already
occurs in Sir 51:24, although it does not necessarily reflect an ancient by-
form. As in Phoenician and early Aramaic, the independent third-person
singular and plural pronouns will also have acted as far-deictics (‘that’),
but epigraphic a estations from pre-Exilic times are still lacking. This is
also true for hallāzε̄ (masc.sg.), hallēzū (fem.sg.), and hallāz (common sg.),
which occur rarely in Biblical Hebrew but became more frequent in later
periods. These are mostly viewed as dialectal variants of zε̄ and zōt; some
scholars, by contrast, associate them with middle deixis like Latin ¯ iste
(‘that one there’, i.e., distant from the speaker but close to the addressee).
Hebrew can distinguish adjectival from pronominal usage by re-
peating the definite article with the demonstrative, contrast ZʾT [QBRT]
‘this is [the tomb]’ (KAI 191 B 1) or ʾRWR HʾDM ʾŠR YPTḤ ʾT ZʾT ‘cursed
be the person who opens this’ (ibid. lines 2–3) with HʿT HZH ‘this time’
(KAI 196:2). Demonstratives used as adjectives without the definite ar-
ticle, as is normal in Phoenician and Moabite, are fairly rare (e.g. Josh
2:20). Their existence indicates that the expansion of the article to the
pronoun is a secondary phenomenon in Hebrew.

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 Ancient Hebrew 89

4.3. Definite article

The prepositive article in Canaanite is commonly explained as from a

presentative particle /han/ and appears to have only gradually turned
into a marker of definiteness, i.e. of contextual identifiability, by way
of grammaticalization. Phoenician evidence points to an onset of this
development between ca. 1000 and 900 bce. It is no doubt connected
with the rise of the postpositive article /-āʾ/ in Aramaic (the “emphatic
state”) and, perhaps, also with the appearance of various morphemes
highlighting definiteness in Ancient North Arabian languages. This may
have been triggered by a far-reaching restructuring of the verbal system,
since the emergence of morphological definiteness markers seems to go
together with a loss of formal means of expressing the perfective aspect
(which is semantically related to nominal definiteness, compare atelic
“I ate apples” with telic “I ate the apples”), as other languages like Ger-
manic show. First-millennium Canaanite, Aramaic, and North Arabian
also all share a certain reduction in the pa ern of use or the functional
range of the nonjussive (i.e., perfective-preterital) “short imperfect” (see
below). If such an explanation proves true, the restructuring of the ver-
bal system and the rise of the definite article in West Semitic may count
as an instance of areal convergence. The growing use of a nota obiecti,
in particular with definite direct objects (see below), may also have
reinforced the need for morphological definiteness marking.
With the Canaanite article, whose occurrence in Hebrew, Phoenician,
and Moabite may result from language contact, the assumed original
form */han/ is prefixed to the noun to which it refers and thus establishes
a stress-unit. As a consequence, the /n/ assimilates to the following con-
sonant, thereby causing lengthening, and disappears from writing. The
constraint against lengthening gu urals and /r/ in Tiberian Hebrew trig-
gers compensatory lengthening of the /a/ (usually before /ʾ/, /ʿ/, and /r/)
or a shi to ε, o en depending on the stress pa ern. A ributive adjec-
tives following a grammatically definite head noun also take the arti-
cle in Hebrew; a er a proclitic preposition, the /h/ of the article mostly
drops out: BŠT HTŠʿT /baš-šat(t) hat-tišʿīt/ ‘in the ninth year’ (frequent in
the Samaria ostraca). Predicative adjectives in nominal clauses, by con-
trast, remain grammatically indefinite: ʾRWR HʾDM /ʾarūr haʾ-ʾadam/
‘cursed be the person’.
The definite article does not appear with names, which already rank
highest on the definiteness scale, or with nouns in the construct state
(exceptions are rare, e.g. 2 Kgs 23:17, 25:11); hence it does not occur with
suffixed (and thus definite) nouns either. A grammatically definite final
element of a construct chain renders the entire expression definite: BGD

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 90 Holger Gzella

ʿBDK /bigd ʿabdak/ ‘the dress of your servant’ (KAI 200:8, 9). Conse-
quently, an indefinite expression like ‘a dress of your servant’s’ would
have to be paraphrased with ‘a dress belonging to your servant’ (*/bigd
la-ʿabdak/). A subsequent adjective can refer to the last noun of such a
chain or to the entire expression.
Since there is no indefinite article in Hebrew, the notion of indefi-
niteness usually remains unmarked. In exceptional cases, however, the
numeral ‘one’ can be employed for this purpose (e.g. 1 Sam 1:1).

4.4. Interrogative and indefinite pronouns

Interrogatives differentiate between persons and things, reflecting a

distinction between animate and inanimate that is otherwise less con-
sistently realized in the grammatical system of Semitic languages. As
yet only the pronoun for persons MY /mī/ ‘who?’ (< */mīya/) is clearly
a ested in pre-Exilic inscriptions: MY ʿBDK ‘who is your servant?’
(KAI 192:3 and elsewhere). Its expected counterpart for things is MH
/mā/ ‘what?’ (< */mah-/; in Tiberian Hebrew, it o en forms a stress unit
with the following word, which causes lengthening of its first conso-
nant or, with gu urals, a shi of the vowel: cf. ma(h)-llḵā ‘what is with
you?’; mε̄ ʿāśītā ‘what have you done?’). Many commentators supply
the la er in KAI¯ 196:9: [LM]H TʿŠW KZʾT ‘why (lit. for what) do you
act like this?’. There are currently no epigraphic a estations of the in-
terrogative adjective ʾay/ʾē ‘which one?’ (< */ayy-/) known from Biblical
Hebrew.
Like other languages, Biblical Hebrew o en uses the interrogatives
as indefinites ‘whoever/whatever’. The pre-Exilic inscriptions contain
only the genuine indefinite pronoun for things MʾWMH /maʾūmā/ ‘any-
thing’ (Tiberian mʾūmā), whose etymology remains debated. In addi-
tion, ʾ(Y)Š /ʾīš/ ‘man, human being’ can be used in a generic (and thus
gender-neutral) sense, as can nέp̄εš ‘person’ or dāḇār ‘thing’ in Biblical
Hebrew.

4.5. Relative particle

The usual, indeclinable, relative particle in Classical Hebrew is ʾŠR /ʾašar/

(Tiberian ʾ ašεr). Most scholars derive it from the noun */ʾatar-/ ‘place’ (in
a similar fashion, German wo ‘where’ can introduce relative ¯ clauses in
some dialects). Beyond Hebrew, it occurs only in Moabite as a relative
particle, presumably due to language contact or parallel development.

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 Ancient Hebrew 91

ʾŠR connects a clause with the preceding expression independent of the

syntactic function of that expression, compare KL SPR ʾŠR YBʾ ʾLY /kull
sipr ʾašar yabū ʾilayy/ ‘every le er which comes to me’ (KAI 193:11–12)
with KKL ʾŠR ŠLḤ ʾDNY KN ʿŠH ʿBDK /ka-kull ʾašar šalaḥ ʾadōnī kin ʿaśō
[or: ʿásā] ʿabdak(ā)/ ‘according to everything (about) which my lord sent,
so your servant has done’ (KAI 194:2–3). The clause introduced by ʾŠR can
also be substantivized, as happens several times in the formula ʾR(W)R ʾŠR
/ʾarūr ʾašar/ ‘cursed be the one who (opens this tomb)’, or lexicalized, as
in the frequent title ʾŠR ʿL HBYT /ʾašar ʿal hab-bēt/ ‘royal steward (lit. the
one who is above the house)’.
Additionally, post-Exilic Hebrew in particular increasingly uses the
proclitic relative particle šε- (< */ša-/?), which seems to go back to an old
byform of a Northern dialect (cf. (ʾ)Š in Phoenician) and has practically
replaced ʾŠR in Rabbinic and Modern Hebrew. Some archaic passages in
the Bible (e.g. Ex 15:13, 16) use zū in the same function. This word is a re-
flex of the inherited Northwest Semitic relative pronoun */ðū/ (Ugaritic
/dū/, Old Byblian /zū/), but it has likewise become indeclinable.

4.6. Nouns

Semitic nouns with their semantically distinct pa erns (albeit in a very

general sense) are formed by internal or external modifications of a root
consisting mostly of three, less frequently of two or four consonants. The
majority of Semitic etymological pa erns appear in Hebrew, but owing to
secondary sound changes like vowel reduction or the shortening of word-
final long consonants, it is not always easy, or even possible, to associate
a particular noun in its Tiberian garb with one of the etymological pat-
terns. Moreover, the vocalization exhibits several peculiarities which are
difficult to explain. Just a few examples: The noun ‘king’, for instance, has
the basic form */malk/, as in Aramaic, as becomes clear from suffixed malkī
‘my king’, instead of the expected Canaanite counterpart */milk/ o en
found in transcriptions of Phoenician names. The abstract noun ‘begin-
ning’ related to */raʾš-/ > /rōš/ ‘head’ is rēšīt, which presupposes either an
underlying byform */riʾš-/ or a shi */aʾ/ > /ē/ ¯ as in Aramaic (cf. Syriac rēš).
Nomina professionis seem to preserve the basic pa ern qaṭ ṭ āl without the
expected shi */ā/ > /ō/. The regular bisyllabic plural base of the noun pat-
terns qaṭ l, qiṭ l, and quṭ l, whose expansion by /a/ is commonly viewed as a
characteristic feature of Northwest Semitic, has le traces in later vocaliza-
tions as pretonic lengthening in the absolute state (mlāḵīm < */malak-īma/)
and spirantization of a stop a er a preceding short vowel (before that
vowel had disappeared) in the construct state (malḵē < */malak-ay/) shows.

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Dual forms, by contrast, take the same (monosyllabic) base as the singular.
In post-Exilic Hebrew, perhaps owing to Aramaic influence, the bisyllabic
plural was extended to nouns according to the pa erns qall, qill, and qull.
Nouns and adjectives inflect for number (singular, dual, and plural),
gender (masculine and feminine), and state (absolute and construct).
The unmarked form is the absolute state; the construct state, or “bound
form,” expresses a genitive relationship with the word immediately fol-
lowing: possessor and possessed form a stress unit. Endings mark all
these dimensions (Table 2); adjectives agree in number and gender with
the noun to which they refer.
As in the other Canaanite idioms and in Aramaic, the masculine plu-
ral in /-īm/ for the absolute state is a fossilized reflex of the old genitive-
accusative ending /-īma/ (preserved in Ugaritic) which, supposedly
being the more frequent form, was generalized a er the collapse of the
inflectional case system (see the chapter on Phoenician for a brief out-
line). Some instances of /-īn/ (e.g. middīn ‘carpets’ Jdg 5:10), as in Aramaic
and Moabite, may reflect dialectal forms; this la er ending became more
widespread in Rabbinic Hebrew. In a similar fashion, the ending /-ē/ of
the dual construct (genitive-accusative) has been extended to the mas-
culine plural and replaced older */-ū/ (nominative) and */-ī/ (genitive-
accusative), again leveling the case difference. Perhaps this is at least
partly due to the fact that */-ī/ could no longer have been distinguished
from the 1sg. possessive suffix /-ī/ (which had by then merged with the
oblique form */-iya/ > /-ī/). The difference between the old feminine end-
ings */-t/ and */-at/ (> /-ā/ in the absolute) was originally lexical and could
vary even in closely related dialects (compare Northern Hebrew ŠT /ša /
< */šant-/ ‘year’, as in the Samaria ostraca, with Southern Hebrew šānā
< */šanat-/, as in the Masoretic text). Besides a few individual words,
/-t/ remained the normal ending of certain noun pa erns like the femi-
nine singular active participle but underwent segolization in Tiberian
Hebrew (*/kōtibt/ > kōtέḇεt ‘writing’ in the basic stem).
¯ ¯

Table 2. Hebrew nominal inflection

Masculine Feminine

abs. sg. (no ending) -H /-ā/ (<*/-at/) or -T /-t/

du. -YM /-aym/>/-ēm/ -TYM /-taym/>/-tēm/
pl. -(Y)M /-īm/ -(W)T /-ōt/ (<*/-āt/)
cst. sg. like sg.abs. -T /-(a)t/
du. -Y /-ay/>/-ē/ -TY /-(a)tay/>/-(a)tē/
pl. like du.cst. like pl.abs.

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 Ancient Hebrew 93

The plene spelling of the masculine plural absolute ending /-īm/

with Y as a vowel le er, corresponding to the usual orthography of the
Masoretic text, is still uncommon in the pre-Exilic inscriptions, where
the writing -YM seems confined to the masculine plural of nisbe ad-
jectives with the affix /-ī/ < */-iy/ (fem.sg. /-iyā/ or /-īt/; masc.pl. /-īm/
< /-iyīm/; the expected fem.pl., to be reconstructed from the correspond-
ing Tiberian form, is /-iyōt/). However, it remains doubtful whether the
le er Y in, for instance, KTYM /ki (iy)īm/ ‘Ki eans’ serves as a vowel
le er or indicates the glide /y/. Examples for the spelling of the feminine
plural are uncertain.
According to the Tiberian pointing and some comparative evidence
from Phoenician, feminine abstracts in /-īt/ also have a plural in /-iyōt/.
This form has been extended to nouns in /-ūt/, owing to dissimilation (or
analogy?), instead of expected */-uwōt/. Feminine nouns in /-ōt/ in the
singular originally had an identical plural ending, which, however, later
gave way to /-iyōt/. Nouns with stressed word-final */-ī/, which was low-
ered to /ε̄/ in Canaanite and Aramaic but disappeared before affixes and
endings (cf. Tiberian qānε̄ < /qanε̄/ ‘reed’ from */qanī/, pl. qānīm < /qanīm/),
must be distinguished both from nisbe adjectives in /-ī/ < */-iy/ and from
triconsonantal (“sound”) forms ending in the glide /-y/. Yet the pronun-
ciation of the la er group’s */-y/ in the absolute singular and construct
as /-ī/ (e.g. */gady/ ‘kid’, Tiberian gdī) facilitated migration between dis-
¯ occasionally to behave like those in
tinct pa erns and caused such nouns
*/-ī/ (contrast Tiberian kēlīm < /kilīm/ ‘vessels’, from */kily/ or */kaly/, with
the usual sound pa ern gdāyīm < /gadayīm/ ‘kids’ from */gady/). Most of
these forms, it is true, are¯not unambiguously a ested in the epigraphic
corpus.
The singular marks an individual thing or a collective; the dual (con-
strued as plural with verbs) ceases to be productive and is increasingly
confined to paired body parts, certain expressions of time or length, and
the numeral ‘two’; the plural can indicate a plurality of individuals or
an amplification of the singular if relevant. Plural forms without a corre-
sponding singular are traditionally called pluralia tantum, such as PNM
/panīm/ ‘face’ or RḤ MM /raḥamīm/ ‘mercy’. Dualia tantum like MYM
/maym/ ‘water’ occur less frequently. Some words pointed as duals in
the Tiberian text actually result from the reanalysis of nondual forms
according to false analogies (e.g. yrūšāláyim ‘Jerusalem’). Not all sub-
stantives which behave like feminines in concord with adjectives and
verbs are marked: “natural” feminines include the names of cities and
countries, nouns like ʾRṢ /ʾarṣ / ‘land, earth’, and so on. With a masculine
collective, the feminine ending can single out an individual or a special
member of the group (like Biblical Hebrew ʾ onī ‘fleet’ and ʾ onīyā ‘ship’).

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Some substantives occur with both genders (e.g. Biblical Hebrew dέrεḵ
‘way’), but even then one gender is usually more common than the other.
Masculine nouns can take feminine plural endings (e.g. Biblical Hebrew
mqōmōt from māqōm < */maqōm/ ‘place’), less o en the other way round
¯
(e.g. Ṣ MQM ŠḤ RT ‘black raisins’ in Lak(7):25). Those rare words which
are a ested with both plural endings (such as Biblical Hebrew šānīm, less
frequently šānōt ‘years’) may partly reflect dialectal forms, partly subtle
¯
differences in meaning (such as perhaps collective vs. individual plu-
ral?). A few nouns expand their plural base by /-ah-/ (e.g. /ʾamā/ ‘maid-
servant’, Biblical Hebrew pl. ʾ amāhōt < */ʾamahōt/) or apophony (e.g., /ʿīr/
‘city’, Biblical Hebrew pl. ʿārīm; /bin/¯ ‘son’, pl. /banīm/). The masculine
plural o en includes the feminine as well, so, e.g., /banīm/ can be used
for ‘children’ regardless of sex.
In a construct chain between a nomen regens (or several of them),
which indicates a thing possessed and loses its primary stress, and the
following nomen rectum, marking the possessor, only the la er can have
a suffix or the definite article. A construct o en expresses an a ribu-
tive relationship, as in ‘city of holiness’ = ‘holy city’. Very occasionally, a
preposition can intervene between nomen regens and nomen rectum (as in
Isa 9:2: śimḥat baq-qāṣ īr ‘the joy during harvest’); even less frequently, an
¯
adverb interrupts a construct chain: especially in Archaic Hebrew, this
also happens with a linking vowel /ī/ (Gen 49:11) or /ō/ (Gen 1:24) – the
li erae compaginis of traditional grammar – or with the “enclitic mem”
which is known from Ugaritic but does not serve any recognizable func-
tion. At times, a subordinate clause can follow a nomen regens in the con-
struct. In such cases, the noun usually has an adverbial function and thus
basically acts like a preposition. The long vowel in the construct (hence
also before suffixes) of ʾB /ʾab/ ‘father’ (pl. /ʾabōt/), ʾḤ /ʾaḥ/ ‘brother’, and
/ḥam/ ‘father-in-law’ (una ested in the inscriptions) is common Semitic.
The terminative affix /-ah/ (> /ā/ in Biblical Hebrew, but spelled with
H and thus labeled he locale), indicating motion toward, can be added not
only to place names and geographical terms but also to certain adverbs
(e.g., ŠMH /šammah/ ‘thither’).

4.7. Numerals

Thanks to economic texts from Samaria and Arad, even the rather small
corpus of epigraphic Hebrew contains a fair number of numerals. Biblical
Hebrew, whose vocalization provides important clues for the older forms,
can largely fill in the remaining gaps. (Those una ested in the inscriptions
are given in reconstruction only.) The cardinal ‘one’ is an adjective, the

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others are substantives: 1 ʾḤ D /ʾaḥad/ (fem. /ʾaḥa / < */ʾaḥadt/), 2 ŠNYM
/šnēm/ (dual; fem. /štēm/; according to others, masc. /šinēm/ and fem.
/ši ēm/ < */šintaym-/, depending on whether one believes in the existence
of original word-initial consonant clusters), 3 ŠLŠ /šalōš/, 4 ʾRBʿ /ʾarbaʿ/,
5 Ḥ MŠ /ḥamiš/, 6 ŠŠ /šišš/, 7 /šabʿ/, 8 /šamōnε̄/, 9 TŠʿ /tišʿ/, 10 ʿŠR /ʿaśr/
(fem. /ʿaśarā/), 100 MʾH /miʾā/, 1000 ʾLP /ʾalp/, 3000 /šalōšat ʾalapīm/ etc.,
10,000 /ribabā/ and /ribbō/. The feminine forms of the cardinals ‘three’
to ‘nine’ take the ending /-ā/ (spelled H; Tiberian ḥamiššā ‘five’ with sec-
ondary gemination is formally assimilated to subsequent šiššā ‘six’). All
tens are masculine plural forms of the corresponding units in the absolute
state, ‘two hundred’ is a dual /miʾatēm/, likewise ‘two thousand’ /ʾalpēm/.
Numerals from 3 to 10 have the opposite gender to the thing counted, pre-
sumably because the “feminine ending” here marks an individual entity
(/šalōšā parīm/ ‘three bulls’, lit. ‘a triad of bulls’). With the numerals for
11 to 19, the unit precedes the ten (e.g. /šalōšā ʿaśr parīm/ ‘thirteen bulls’).
Ordinals, which only exist for the first decade, are adjectives derived
from the corresponding cardinals with the vowel sequence /a–ī/ and the
nisbe ending /-ī/ (but /rīšōn/ ‘first’, fem. /rīšōnā/; /šinī/ ‘second’), hence
ŠLŠY /šalīšī/ ‘third’ etc. Contrary to the cardinals, however, they ex-
hibit straightforward concord. Their feminine counterparts (in /-īt/) also
mostly indicate fractions (with some rare byforms on the quṭ l pa ern,
i.e. /rubʿ/ ‘quarter’, /ḥumš/ ‘fi h’). The usual word for ‘half’ is */ḥiṣ y/ >
Tiberian ḥaṣ ī. Distributives can be expressed by asyndetically repeating
numerical expressions. Multiplicatives are rendered in many different
ways, including the feminine singular or dual of a cardinal and various
periphrastic expressions (e.g. with /paʿm/ ‘step’).

4.8. Verbs

The finite verbal conjugations are inflectional categories which express

person, number, and gender by means of specific morphemes. They
mark tense (past or present-future), aspect (i.e., the inner contour of an
event: completed or in progress), and modality (various nuances of pos-
sibility, reality, or desirability). All conjugations and verbal nouns are
based on derivational categories (“verbal stems”) of a verbal root con-
sisting of two, three, or, rarely, four consonants. These derivational pat-
terns specify the lexical meaning in terms of situation type (causative,
factitive) or differentiate between active, passive, and several medial nu-
ances. The most frequent word order in Ancient Hebrew is Verb-Subject-
Object, but it is less easy to say whether this also acts as the unmarked
order of constituents. Subject and predicate generally agree in gender

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Table 3. Hebrew “perfect“inflection

Singular Plural

1 KTB-T(Y) /katáb-tī/ (kātáḇtī) KTB-NW /katáb-nū/ (kātáḇnū)

¯ ¯
2masc. KTB-T(H) /katáb-tā/ (kātáḇtā) KTB-TM /katab-tim/ (ktaḇtεm)
¯ ¯
2fem. — /katáb-t(ī)/ (kātaḇt) — /katab-tín(nā)/ (ktaḇtεn)
¯ ¯
3masc. KTB /katab/ (kātaḇ) KTB-W /katab-ū/ (kātḇū)
¯ ¯
3fem. — /katab-ā/ (kātḇā) — (presumably identical
¯
(< */katab-at/) to 3 m.pl., as in
Biblical Hebrew)

and number; however, a third-person predicate preceding compound

subjects o en occurs in the singular.
With the “perfect,” o en also labeled “suffix-conjugation,” personal
endings (termed “afformatives” here in order to distinguish them from
possessive suffixes and derivational endings) are added to the “perfect”
base (Table 3). The labels “perfect” and “imperfect” are preferred here
to “suffix-conjugation” and “prefix-conjugation” by reason of brevity,
even though the use of a semantically based label might not be perfectly
appropriate for a morphological category; and also because the prefix-
conjugation involves some endings as well.
The vowel in the second syllable of the “perfect” in the unmarked
stem is basically lexical and differs from root to root. In principle, it cor-
responds to the distinction between fientive verbs (verbs denoting an ac-
tion), which usually have /a/, and stative verbs (verbs rendering a state),
many of which have /i/ (e.g. /kabid/ ‘he was heavy’) or, less frequently,
/u/ (as in /qaṭ un/ ‘he was small’, which is restriced to permanent states;
cf. the different use of ser and estar for ‘to be’ in Spanish). Gu urals and
/r/ o en trigger a change of this vowel to /a/.
Like the pronouns and possessive suffixes, the final vowels of the
“perfect” afformatives also seem to oscillate between short and long,
hence /ā/ did not shi to /ō/. This may also be related to the stress pat-
tern. Later pointings and extensive use of plene writing in the Qumran
material partly compensate for the limitations of the epigraphic corpus
and the consonantal spelling. Due to the time gap and the nonlinear
development of Hebrew, a number of uncertainties remain:

– It is controversial whether the plene writing KTBTH for the 2masc.

sg., which regularly occurs in Qumran as opposed to the equally reg-
ular defective spelling in the Masoretic text, was already in use in pre-
Exilic times. All possible a estations in the early inscriptions could, in
principle, also be analyzed as forms with a third-person suffix.

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 Ancient Hebrew 97

– Due to the lack of direct evidence, one cannot say with certainty
whether and to what extent the afformative of the 2fem.sg. had
preserved the etymological form /-tī/ (/-ti/) in pre-Exilic times (as
an archaism, this older variant occurs twice in the Masoretic text
of Jdg 5:7: qamtī ‘you have risen’) or, like Tiberian Hebrew, had re-
placed it with secondary /-t/. The loss of the functionally superflu-
ous vowel resulted in the restoration of the formal difference from
the 1sg., since old Northwest Semitic /-tū, -tu/ (< original Semitic
*/-ku/) had already shi ed to /-tī, -ti/ in early Canaanite. The only
relevant witness from Qumran, the Isaiah scroll 1QIsa, has both -TY
and -T. Presumably, this form exhibits the same development as the
independent 2fem.sg. pronoun.
– In the old inscriptions, the 3fem.sg. afformative occurs only with
the weak root hyī ‘to be’ but, as in Tiberian Hebrew, this form ends
in /-t/. According to the Masoretic text and the Dead Sea Scrolls,
one would expect the ending /-ā/ (wri en with H as a vowel le er)
for sound roots. Older /katab-at/ has been preserved before pro-
nominal object suffixes.
– The byform in -TMH /-timmā/ for the 2masc.pl. in Qumran Hebrew
seems to be a late variant which results from analogy with the in-
dependent personal pronoun. No evidence for such a late variant
exists for the 2fem.pl., whose standard form is una ested in the
epigraphic corpus as well.
– As a rule, the inherited form for the 3fem.pl., */-ā/ (identical to the
corresponding singular Hebrew), was replaced by the 3masc.pl.

The exact function of the “perfect” depends on the lexical meaning

of the verbal root in the respective stem and on the broader context. Sta-
tive verbs express states independent of any particular location in time
and thus behave like conjugated adjectives. Hence such forms appear to
be semantically identical to nominal clauses. With fientive verbs, by con-
trast, to which an ancestor of the “perfect” conjugation was extended in
a much earlier period of Semitic (as with the “have”-perfect in Romance,
where a construction like “I have bought a house” derives from *“I have
a bought house”), the “perfect” mostly occurs with individual events in
the past, in subordinate clauses with a location in time relatively anterior
to that of the verb in the corresponding main clause (cf. KAI 194:2f., cited
in Section 4.5). This event can be punctual and completed (as in WSM-
KYHW LQḤ H ŠMʿYHW /wa-Samakyahū laqaḥō Šamaʿyahū/ ‘and as for
Samakyahū, Šamaʿyahū seized him [and then brought him to town]’ KAI
194:6); it can endure in the past (bihyōt hay-yεlεd ḥay dibbarnū ʾēlāw ‘when
¯ ¯

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 98 Holger Gzella

the child was still alive, we talked to it’ 2 Sam 12:18); or it can have a
present significance (NSH ʾYŠ LQRʾ LY SPR LNṢ Ḥ /nissō ʾ īš la-qrō lī sipr
la-niṣ ḥ/ ‘nobody has ever tried to read out a le er to me’ KAI 193:9–10).
It is controversial whether the functional range of the “perfect” in-
discriminately covers all these distinctions or whether it gives an event a
perfective nuance independent of its true duration. A resultative nuance
o en close in meaning to a state regularly occurs with some verbs of feel-
ing and thinking (e.g., Lʾ YDʿTH /lō yadaʿtō/ ‘you have not recognized
it = you don’t know it’ KAI 193:8; cf. halō ydaʿtεm ‘don’t you know?’ 2 Sam
¯ in the case of performatives,
11:20). Past-perfective and resultative meet
where the u erance is identical to the act it describes (as in BRKT ʾTKM
/birriktī ʾatkim(ā)/ ‘I hereby bless you’ KAgr(9):8:1; ŠLḤ T ʾT ŠLM /šalaḥtī
ʾat-šalōm/ ‘I hereby send peace’ Mur(7):1:1). Nevertheless, not all uses of
the perfect can be subsumed under the categories of tense and/or aspect.
Instances of the “gnomic perfect,” for instance, which highlight the uni-
versal truth of knowledge gained by experience, verge on the domain of
epistemic modality (ʿārūm rāʾā rāʿā nistār ‘a smart person sees danger and
takes refuge’ Prov 27:12; in English, by contrast, gnomic statements are
usually in the present, but compare “Faint heart never won fair lady”).
The same may apply to certain prophetic passages, where the “perfect”
is used for a future event and above all reinforces the speakerʾs certainty
(ʾāmar šōmēr ‘the watchman will say’ Isa 21:12). Some instances, again
o en in poetry, can also be understood in a deontic-modal way (“perfect
of wish,” e.g. Ps 4:2, 22:22). However, the precise interaction of the seman-
tic categories tense, aspect, and modality in such cases and the distinction
between primary and metaphorical meanings remain a ma er of debate.
A firm combination of the “perfect” and the conjunction /wa-/ ‘and’
eventually produced a new conjugation in Classical prose, the “perfect
consecutive,” which is chiefly employed for rendering deontic-modal
nuances. Its origin may lie in the use of /wa-/ in the apodosis of con-
ditional clauses, where the subsequent “perfect” indicates nonpast
events (cf. 2 Sam 11:19–21: ‘if the king asks you . . . , you shall say to him
[w-ʾāmartā]’). This conjugation o en serves to elaborate on a preceding
imperative to express, e.g., a purpose or a further, subordinate, com-
mand (e.g. hāḇū [imperative, main command] . . . w-šaḇtεm [secondary
command] mē-ʾ aḥarāw w-nikkā wā-mēt [double purpose] ‘put [Uriah out
in front where the fighting is fiercest]¯ and then withdraw from him, so
that he will be hit and die’ 2 Sam 11:15). It also occurs with ongoing
or repeated past events (w-ʿālā hā-ʾīš ‘and the man would go up’ 1 Sam
1:3). Such an overlap between modality and habitual past is known from
other languages as well (cf. ‘would’ in ‘he would do so every day’). Ul-
timately the Masoretes tended to single out this conjugation by marking

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 Ancient Hebrew 99

final stress in the first and second persons of the singular, thereby sec-
ondarily distinguishing it from the plain “perfect.” It gradually disap-
peared in post-Exilic times (cf. w-hεʿεḇīr ʾōtām ‘he would set them to
labor’ in 2 Sam 12:31, which is omi ed in the¯parallel verse in 1 Chr 20:3).
Its loss may have been influenced or at least reinforced by an increasing
use of Aramaic and possibly also by other, dialectal, Hebrew varieties
which did not share this innovation of literary Judean prose but gener-
ally used /wa-/ for sequences of plain “perfects” referring to past events
only. The la er, termed the “copulative perfect,” became more and more
common in later Hebrew, but its existence in Classical prose and in the
pre-Exilic inscriptions, where the “imperfect consecutive” was the usual
means of expressing progress in narrative, is debated.
The second pillar of the Hebrew verbal system is the “imperfect” or
“prefix-conjugation.” Person, number, and gender are marked by mor-
phemes prefixed (“preformatives”) to the “imperfect” base of a given
stem (e.g. /-ktub-/); some forms also take afformatives (Table 4).
As with the “perfect,” the base vowel in the stem syllable of the un-
marked stem is lexical. Transitive-fientive verbs with /a/ in the “perfect”
base usually have /u/ in the “imperfect” but /a/ with a root-final gu ural.
Others, including stative verbs which mostly have /i/ in the “perfect,”
also have /a/, whereas /i/ rarely occurs as a base vowel of the “imper-
fect.” With the “imperfect” base vowel /a/, however, the preformative
vowel /a/ had dissimilated to /i/ already in some early Northwest Semitic
languages, as shown by Ugaritic: hence /yizqan/ with the “perfect”
/zaqin/ ‘he is old’, /yišlaḥ/ with /šalaḥ/ ‘he sent’. This principle is called
the “Barth-Ginsberg Law.” By the time of the earliest vocalized manu-
scripts, the dissimilated preformatives /yi-/, /ti-/, etc. had been extended
to all sound roots in Hebrew and Aramaic (hence Tiberian yiḵtoḇ),
whereas remnants of original /ya-/ have only been preserved in certain
classes of weak roots. Since it is unknown when exactly the dissimilated
form was generalized in Hebrew, the present historical reconstruction
uses the original form for pre-Exilic material.

Table 4. Hebrew “imperfect” inflection

Singular Plural

1 ʾ-KTB /ʾa-ktub/ (ʾεḵtoḇ) N-KTB /na-ktub/ (niḵtoḇ)

2masc. T-KTB /ta-ktub/ (tiḵtoḇ) T-KTB-W /ta-ktub-ū/ (tiḵtḇū)
2fem. — /ta-ktub-ī/ (tiḵtḇī) — /ta-ktúb-nā/ (tiḵtóḇnā)
3masc. Y-KTB /ya-ktub/ (yiḵtoḇ) Y-KTB-W /ya-ktub-ū/ (yiḵtḇū)
3fem. T-KTB /ta-ktub/ (tiḵtoḇ) — /ta-ktúb-nā/ (tiḵtóḇnā)

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 100 Holger Gzella

In order to adequately understand the functional range of the He-

brew “imperfect,” it is important to realize that this form reflects a
partial merger of two different conjugations which can still be distin-
guished in Ugaritic and Classical Arabic: first, a “long” form with a
short final vowel /u/ in forms without afformatives (/ya-ktub-u/ etc.)
and an additional expansion with /-na/ in the 2–3pl. and the 2fem.sg.
(/ya-ktub-ūna/, /ta-ktub-īna/, etc.); second, a historically older “short”
form without these characteristics. According to some scholars, the lat-
ter was also distinguished by consistently being stressed on the preced-
ing syllable (e.g., /yáktub/), of which traces have been preserved in the
Masoretic accentuation. The two conjugations had rather different func-
tional ranges. When short unstressed final vowels disappeared in Ca-
naanite and Aramaic, many forms, including some of the most frequent,
could no longer clearly be distinguished on morphological grounds.
Contrary to Phoenician and Aramaic, however, the paradigm of the
“short imperfect” has been widely generalized in Hebrew, so that the
forms expanded with /-n(a)/ have largely disappeared. This is o en ex-
plained on phonetic grounds, such as sandhi with the following word.
The older differentiation into a long and a short form of the “imperfect,”
however, still has far-reaching implications for clear differences in mean-
ing, word order, and, chiefly with the classes of IIī/ū and IIIy/ī verbs, also
in morphology.
“Imperfects” that do not occur clause-initially by and large reflect
old long forms. Their functional range covers relative present-future,
which interacts with modality (since the future is basically uncertain and
the notion of certainty is fundamental to many modal nuances), and the
imperfective aspect inherent also in past events portrayed as continu-
ous or repeated (this being an obvious point of contact with the present
tense, which is by definition ongoing). A er ʾZ /ʾiz/ ʾāz ‘then’, an “im-
perfect” can also refer to past events that are not necessarily durative or
habitual. The exact nuance is o en difficult to determine. Discursive pas-
sages frequently exhibit various shades of epistemic modality, while the
location in time must be determined on the basis of the context (e.g., Lʾ
NRʾH ʾT ʿZQH /lō narʾε̄ ʾat-ʿAzīqā/ ‘we can’t [or: don’t] see ʿAziqa’ KAI
194:11; ʾḤ Y YʿNW LY /ʾaḥḥayy yaʿnū lī/ ‘my brothers can [or: will] wit-
ness for me’ KAI 200:10; wa-ʾanī ʾāḇō ʾεl-bēt ī ‘and I, how can I return to my
house?’ 2 Sam 11:11). Owing to a formal ¯overlap between epistemic and
deontic modality (just as must and may can express different degrees of
both certainty and obligation), some deontic-modal uses are also a ested
(cf. the use of the long form for a wish in 1 Sam 17:37 but the usual short
form in 1 Kgs 8:57). Narrative passages, by contrast, generally employ
the “(long) imperfect” for durative-habitual events (ū-mikkōsō tištε̄ ‘and
¯

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 Ancient Hebrew 101

it used to drink from his cup’ 2 Sam 12:3; w-ḵen yaʿ aśε̄ ‘and so he would
do [to all the cities of the Ammonites]’ 2 Sam 12:31). Temporal, purpose
(o en a er /wa-/), and generalizing relative clauses also take the “long
imperfect.” Some forms of the 2–3pl. have preserved a remnant /-ūn/
(< */-ūna/), the original “long imperfect” endings (nun paragogicum),
o en in pausal intonation and before gu urals.
“Imperfects” that occur in initial position in main clauses, by con-
trast, generally correspond to old short forms, so word-order constraints
to some extent restore the functional differentiation. Most free-standing
occurrences are “jussives.” They express different types of deontic mo-
dality such as wishes and commands (YŠMʿ ʾDNY /yišmaʿ ʾadōnī/ ‘let
my lord hear!’ KAI 200:1) and take the negation ʾL /ʾal/ (ʾL TŠMʿ /ʾal
tišmaʿ/ ‘don’t listen!’ Mur(7):1:2). An indissoluble connection of the con-
junction /wa-/ with a “short imperfect” (the “imperfect consecutive”),
on the other hand, constitutes one of the most distinctive hallmarks of
Classical Hebrew prose style. By the time of the Masoretic punctuation,
the bonding of the two elements was reinforced by gemination in the
prefix (/wa-yaktub/ > wayyiḵtoḇ), unlike /wa-/ (> w) with the long form.
Since this resulted in a closed initial syllable, the vowel /a/ of the con-
junction has been preserved. Except for some free-standing forms in
Early Hebrew poetry, the sharply defined past perfective function of
the “short imperfect” has only been preserved in this new conjugation
(consequently yarʿem ‘he thundered’ in the archaic passage 2 Sam 22:14
has been replaced by wayyarʿem in the later reworking in Ps 18:14). It
mostly occurs with sequences of completed main events in the past and
thus acts as the default narrative form. Not all instances are strictly se-
quential, though, but many alleged exceptions refer to the same event
expressed by two main verbs, e.g., ‘they ate and drank’.
Events rendered with this form appear concentrated in a single
point; circumstances expressed by the durative “long imperfect,” by
a “perfect” in subordinate clauses, or by a participle or other nominal
construction constitute the background against which the main line of
the story evolves. With stative verbs, this conjugation usually renders
an ingressive situation (wa iḵbad hammilḥāmā ‘the ba le became fierce’
¯
1 Sam 31:3, from kbd ‘to be heavy’). Such sequences o en start with an
initial situation described by the “perfect” (HKW . . . WYLKW HMYM
/ hikkū . . . wa-yalikū ham-maym/ ‘[the stonecu ers] struck [toward each
other], then the water flowed’ KAI 189:4). Syntactic and semantic con-
straints do not allow this narrative form to be used together with a ne-
gation, in which case /lō/ and the perfect come into play. Likewise, a
switch to the “perfect” occurs when the narrative flow is interrupted
by another element, such as an adverb, that occurs clause-initially. One

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 102 Holger Gzella

could imagine that the “imperfect consecutive” served as a literary pres-

tige device that was soon imitated by other chanceries (as in Moab) and
in less formal texts, such as the petition of a harvester (KAI 200). Like the
“perfect consecutive,” it disappeared in later periods but continued to be
used in classicizing texts (e.g. from Qumran).
Before object suffixes with the “imperfect,” remnants of the old “en-
ergic” ending /-an(na)/ (with /á/ > ε in Tiberian Hebrew) have been pre-
served. The “cohortative” in /-ā/ (a vestige of the subjunctive in */-a/?) in
the 1sg./pl. is confined to self-exhortation in Classical Hebrew.
The imperative basically corresponds to the second person of the
“short imperfect” without a preformative: masc.sg. /ktub/ (ktob), occa-
¯ ¯ (kitbū);
sionally expanded by /-ā/; fem.sg. /ktub-ī/ (kitbī); masc.pl. /ktub-ū/
fem.pl. /ktúb-nā/ (któbnā). Only the masculine forms are a ested in¯ ¯the
¯ ¯
epigraphic material.¯ It¯ is quite likely that the unstable word-initial con-
sonant cluster, whose existence follows from the direct etymological
connection of the imperative with the base of the “short imperfect,” was
o en resolved with anaptyctic vowels in pronunciation, which then
caused spirantization of a plosive stop as second root le er. Suffixes can
be a ached to an /-n-/ apparently taken over from the energic (ŠLḤ NW
‘send it!’ Arad(6):4:2).
Both forms of the participle, active /kōtib/ ‘writing’ and passive /katūb/
‘wri en’, inflect like a noun for gender, number, and state. They are o en
substantivized, especially with professions and groups of persons. The
active feminine singular frequently undergoes segolization in Tiberian
Hebrew (kōtέbεt beside kōtbā). When used predicatively, the active form
renders an ¯ongoing
¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ contemporaneous with the tense value of
situation
the context. Instances with a verbal function occur, albeit infrequently,
already in pre-Exilic Hebrew for the present tense (MŠʾT LKŠ NḤ NW
ŠMRM /maśśaʾōt Lakiš naḥnū šōmirīm/ ‘we are watching the smoke sig-
nals from Lachish’ KAI 194:10f.) or for the immediate future (mēqīm ʿālε̄ḵā
rāʿā ‘I am on the point of bringing disaster on you!’ 2 Sam 12:11). The lat-
ter is particularly common a er the presentative /hinnε̄/. Together with a
finite form of the root hyī ‘to be’, the participle marks durative or habitual
situations in the past (with the “perfect” of hyī) or in the future (with the
“imperfect”). However, only in post-Exilic Hebrew was it gradually in-
tegrated into the verbal system as a normal present-tense form. Aramaic
influence seems to have reinforced this process by way of contact-induced
replication of a use pa ern that was significantly more advanced in Ara-
maic at that time.
The “infinitive absolute” in Hebrew corresponds to the common Se-
mitic infinitive */katāb-/ > /katōb/ (kātōb). In Classical Hebrew, it o en fea-
tures in “paronomastic” constructions ¯ ¯ together with a finite verb of the

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 Ancient Hebrew 103

same root and, usually, in the same stem to mark an assertion (ŠLḤ ŠLḤ T
/šalōḥ šalaḥtī/ ‘I hereby send’ Mur(7):1:1). Also, several adverbs, o en
from derived stems, are lexicalized infinitive absolutes (e.g., haškēm ‘tire-
lessly’, /halōk/ ‘continuously’). It can also appear instead of an imperative
(among the epigraphic witnesses, this is especially common in the Arad
le ers, e.g. NTN /natōn/ ‘give!’ Arad(6):1:2 and elsewhere) and, rather in-
frequently, replace a finite verbal form without overtly marking tense, as-
pect, or modality. This last function, which is much more widespread in
the Phoenician royal inscriptions, occurs quite rarely in Classical Hebrew
(occasionally, WʾSM in KAI 200:5, 6f. is understood as an infinitive absolute
rendering a circumstantial event ‘while he was measuring’, but it can also
be parsed as a “perfect”) and completely disappeared a er a short-lived
renaissance in the Second Temple period.
Another form, the “infinitive construct,” appears a er proclitic prep-
ositions for temporal and purpose clauses and as a complement (usu-
ally introduced by /la-/) a er auxiliary verbs. It has the pa ern /ktub/
(ktob), with suffixes /kutb-/ (kotb-); the relationship with the infinitive
¯ ¯
absolute is debated. Owing to the¯ dual nature of the infinitive, nominal
uses (‘my writing’) take possessive suffixes, verbal uses (‘to write me’)
object suffixes. The quotative marker LʾMR /lēmōr/ ‘saying’ is a fossilized
adverbial infinitive.

4.9. “Weak” verbs

Verbal roots that do not consist of three stable consonantal root le ers
(“radicals,” o en indicated by Roman numbers) exhibit certain peculiar-
ities with respect to “sound” (or “strong”) roots. Such “weak” (in an op-
posite sense as in Indo-European linguistics!) roots can be divided into
different classes that exhibit predictable behavior; the alternative term
“irregular” is thus misleading. Certain overlaps, however, show that the
boundaries between these classes were not always clear. Since the con-
sonantal writing is so ambiguous, the Tiberian pointing and historical-
comparative material have to serve as the point of departure here.
– Many Iy verbs Iy originally had root-initial /w/ (e.g. yšb < *wθb ‘to
sit’), which has o en been preserved in the causative stem. The
“imperfect” is largely based on the second and third radicals, espe-
cially with roots which have /i/ as their lexical base vowel. This is
o en viewed as a remnant of bi-radical roots, although sound forms
are also a ested: imv.masc.sg. /šib/ (šeḇ) ‘sit down!’, /daʿ/ ‘know!’
(from ydʿ), etc., “imperfect” /yašib/ (yēšeḇ), /yidaʿ/ (yēdaʿ). The place
¯
of the infinitive construct is taken by a feminine verbal noun in

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 104 Holger Gzella

/-t/ (/šibt/, /daʿt/) that undergoes segolization in Tiberian Hebrew

(šέbεt , dáʿat ). Many In roots behave similarly, since the first radical
¯ ¯ ¯
disappears due to assimilation of /n/: /yiggaš/ < */yingaš/ (from ngš
‘to approach’), imperative /gaš/, infinitive construct /gašt/ (gέšεt ),
¯
and other verbs with the “imperfect” basel vowel /a/, but /yaṣ ṣ ur/
< */yanṣ ur/ (yiṣ ṣ or, from nṣ r ‘to protect’), imperative /nṣ ur/ (nṣ or),
infinitive construct /nṣ ur/ (nṣ or). The verb ntn ‘to give’ (/ya in/ yit-
ten, /tin/ ten, /ti / tet ) is a special case since it has the form ytn in
¯
Ugaritic and Phoenician. Likewise, lqḥ ‘to take’ resembles a In verb
(/yiqqaḥ/, /qaḥ/, /qaḥt/ qáḥat ), as o en (though not always) also hlk
¯
‘to go’ does as well .

– “Hollow roots,” or IIī and IIū roots, with a long vowel between
the first and last radicals, preserve that vowel in the “imperfect”
base and in the infinitive construct (/(ya-)śīm/, /śīm/ ‘to place’;
/(ya-)qūm/, /qūm/ ‘to stand’). In the “short imperfect,” it was short-
ened, hence the Tiberian distinction between yā́qom (< */yaqum/)
for the jussive as well as the “imperfect consecutive” (with penulti-
mate stress) and the long form yāqūm (< */yaqūm/). The “perfect,”
by contrast, has /a/, less frequently /i/, as with sound roots, which,
unexpectedly, is long in the Masoretic text (qām), as in Aramaic, and
did not shi to / /; likewise in the participle. Before consonantal af-
formatives, either the base vowel was shortened (qamtā ‘you stood
up’) or another, long, vowel was added to avoid a doubly closed
syllable (regularly in the causative stem: haqīmōt ī ‘I have erected’).
¯
While both strategies serve the same purpose in the end of obeying
a phonological constraint, they do not seem to be interchangeable,
and shortening of the long base vowel occurs more commonly, es-
pecially in the G-stem. Verbs which also have root-final /-ī/ (IIIy/ī)
treat their middle radical like a consonantal glide.

– Verbs IIIy/ī as well as former verbs *IIIw/ū have monophthongized

the intervocalic glide in most forms (3masc.sg. */banaya/ > */banā/,
which should lead to /banō/ but appears as bānā ‘he built’ in the Ti-
berian text; 3masc.pl. */banayū/ > /banū/). Base-final /ī/ is preserved
before consonantal afformatives (e.g., 2masc.sg. /banītā/). In the
3fem.sg., by contrast, the /-t/ of the old afformative was reanalyzed
as a third radical (hence /hayāt/ > /hayatā/ hayt ā ‘she was’) and only
¯
preserved in rare byforms (as shown by HYT instead of expected
*HYTH in KAI 189:3, these were used even in Jerusalem). The “long
imperfect” ends in stressed /-ε̄/ (*/yabniyu/ > */yabnī/ > /yabnε̄/
yiḇnε̄); the short form has lost the vocalic reflex of the final radical
(*/yabniy/ > /yabni/ > /yabn/, Tiberian yíḇεn, with anaptyxis). The

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 Ancient Hebrew 105

infinitive construct usually ends in /-ōt/, the absolute one in /-ō/,

the participles in /-ε̄/ (active) and /-ūy/ (passive).
– “Geminate” roots with a long second radical (II = III) exhibit both
sound (e.g., 3masc.sg. /sabab/ sāḇaḇ ‘he surrounded’, from sbb, and
always in the participle and the infinitive absolute) and weak forms
(e.g., 3masc.sg. /qall/ qal ‘he is light’, from qll, and generally be-
fore consonantal afformative, hence /sabbōtī/ ‘I surrounded’ with
additional /-ō-/ in order to prevent an overlong syllable consisting
of a long consonant followed by yet another consonant). With the
“imperfect,” Tiberian Hebrew has, besides reflexes of the inherited
forms like yāsōḇ (< */yasubb/), “Aramaizing” variants with a long
first radical and a simple second radical (yissoḇ). Occasionally, these
have somewhat distinct meanings.
– Weak articulation of gu urals and /r/ in Tiberian Hebrew has given
rise to various other peculiarities, such as compensatory lengthen-
ing of the preceding vowel in many cases when a consonant could
not be lengthened.

4.10. Verbal stems

In order to express factitive and causative situation types (Aktionsarten)

on the one hand and active, middle, and passive voice on the other, Se-
mitic languages use various derivational categories, called verbal stems
(binyanim in traditional grammar), which underlie finite verbal conjuga-
tions and verbal nouns. They are derived from the unmarked basic stem
(G-stem, a er German “Grundstamm,” Hebrew Qal) via apophony, con-
sonantal length, or additional morphemes. The exact nuance of every
verb in a particular stem depends on the meaning of the root and can
differ substantially from case to case. Only a few roots are productive in
more than a small portion of all the possible stem modifications. Here,
too, many peculiarities can best be assessed in light of the vocalization:
– The N-stem (Nif ʿal) has the prefix /na-/ (Tiberian ni-): “perfect” and
participle /naktab/ (Tiberian niḵtab and niḵtāḇ), the la er o en with
¯
gerundival nuances, just as Latin invictus ‘unconquered’ = ‘invinci-
ble’; “imperfect” /yakkatib/ (< */yankatib/; yikkāt eb); imperative and
¯ ¯
infinitive construct /hikkatib/ (hikkāt eb); infinitive absolute /naktōb/
¯ ¯
or /hikkatōb/ (niḵtōb, hikkāt ōb). This stem expresses various nuances
¯ ¯ ¯
of the middle voice, including reciprocity (as in lḥm N ‘to fight’) but
rarely genuine reflexivity. It acts as a detransitivizing counterpart
to active G-stem verbs (rāʾā G ‘he saw’, nirʾā N ‘he appeared’) and

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 106 Holger Gzella

renders the ingressive manifestation of a particular quality with

stative roots. Some verbs also have middle meanings in the G-stem
(e.g., ṣ pn both ‘to hide something’ and, like N, ‘to hide [oneself]’).
– The D(oubling)-stem (Piʿel), by contrast, increases the transitivity
of the verb or indicates verbal plurality (e.g., when a considerably
larger number of direct objects is involved). It is formed by length-
ening the middle radical: “perfect” /ki ib/ (ki eḇ, qiddaš); “imper-
fect,” imperative, and infinitive construct /(ya-)ka ib/ ((y-)ka eḇ);
infinitive absolute /ka ōb/; participle /muka ab/ (mka eḇ). Low-
transitivity G-stem verbs regularly have a factitive meaning in the
D-stem (qādaš G ‘he was holy’, qiddaš D ‘he made holy’). This stem
¯
is also used with many denominal verbal roots.
– The C(ausative)-stem (Hif ʿil) cannot always be clearly distinguished
from the factitive D-stem on semantic grounds, but it generally fo-
cuses on the action itself instead of on the result (hiqdīš C ‘he sancti-
fied’). Intransitive verbs become singly transitive, transitive ones in
part doubly transitive (e.g., ‘to show someone something’). Again,
some denominal verbs appear in the C-stem even though no caus-
ative nuance is involved. The characteristic prefix /hi-/ (< */ha-/)
disappears between vowels: “perfect” /hiktib/ (hiḵtīḇ, presumably
with secondary lengthening of the /i/ in the second syllable, which
is always wri en defectively in pre-Exilic inscriptions; before con-
sonantal afformatives, /i/ becomes /a/: 2masc.sg. hiḵtaḇtā); “imper-
fect” /yaktib/ < */yahaktib/ (“long imperfect” yaḵtīḇ in Tiberian He-
brew; before consonantal afformatives with /i/, pronounced [e], as
also appears in the “short imperfect”: yaḵteḇ); imperative /haktib/
(haḵteḇ); infinitive construct /haktib/ (haḵtīḇ), absolute haḵtēḇ (pre-
Tiberian form unknown; by analogy, one would expect */haktōb/?);
participle /maktib/ < */muhaktib/ (maḵtīḇ).
As in Ugaritic and Aramaic, the G, D, and C stems in Northwest
Semitic all once had a reflexive counterpart with a /t/ prefix or infix. He-
brew, by contrast, has preserved only the tD stem (Hitpaʿel) as a produc-
tive category mostly expressing reflexivity and related ¯ notions (such as
iterativity with the root hlk ‘to walk’): “perfect,” imperative, and infini-
tive construct /hitka ib/ (hitka eḇ); “imperfect” /yatka ib/ (yitka eḇ); in-
¯
finitive absolute hitka ēḇ. Fossilized ¯
remainders of the Gt-stem, whose
¯
functions were partly absorbed by the Nif ʿal (the closest equivalent in
terms of meaning), survive in archaic place names and some instances
of the root pqd ‘to muster’ in Jdg 20:17; occasionally, perhaps, (lexical-
ized) remnants of the Ct-stem can also be identified, whose functional
range was then in part incorporated into the tD stem. The most likely

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 Ancient Hebrew 107

example is the root ḥwy Ct ‘to bow down’. (Interestingly, the same root
also provides most of the certain examples of the Ct in Ugaritic, which
suggests that the Ct-stem was slowly becoming unproductive already in
that earlier stage of Northwest Semitic.)
In addition to that, G, D, and C each formed an “internal” passive by
means of apophony using the vowel sequence /u/–/a/. These mostly act
as genuine passives by exchanging the grammatical roles of subject and
object of an underlying active expression. The Dp (Hebrew Puʿal) and
Cp (Hof ʿal) variants remained fully productive in Hebrew, whereas the
Gp (Qal passive), presumably due to its large functional overlap with the
N-stem, soon became confined to the participle /katūb/. Only a few very
frequent roots are also a ested in the finite conjugations. The Gp “per-
fect,” which is formally identical to the Puʿal in the Tiberian pointing
because the vowel in the first syllable has been preserved by the length-
ening of the second radical, while the Gp “imperfect” resembles that of
the Hof ʿal. Gp instances can, however, be identified when their active
counterpart is a G- and not a D- or a C-stem form.
Since most IIī/ū roots and some geminate verbs do not lengthen the
middle radical, the corresponding D-stem functions were taken over by
morphological byforms according to the pa ern /qōmim/ (active),
/qōmam/ (passive), and /hitqōmim/ (reflexive; with /i/ > e in the Tiberian
vocalization) in the “perfect.” Very rarely, this so-called L-stem (Pōlel) is
also a ested with sound roots (“Pōʿel”) and sometimes credited with a
distinct meaning (i.e., expressing relations, like the “third stem” in Clas-
sical Arabic), but no consistent functional range can be identified on the
basis of the surviving examples. D-stem forms according to the sound
pa ern are in part already a ested in later biblical books (e.g. qiyyam ‘he
confirmed’ Esth 9:32), but their use increased only in post-biblical times.
A few other (lexicalized?) stems (e.g., Pilpel, Paʿlal) seem to be confined to
particular roots.

4.11. Prepositions and particles

The most frequent Hebrew prepositions are the three proclitics B /bi-/ ‘in,
at’, L /la-/ (< /li-/) ‘for, to, by’, and K /ka-/ ‘as’ (b-, l-, k-). They specify rela-
tions whose exact nuance depends on the particular verb and construc-
tion. When a ached to a noun with a definite article, the /h/ of the article
disappears. Their longer nonclitic byforms have an expansion /-mō/ (al-
ways used with /ka-/ before monosyllabic suffixes). Also common are:
ʾḤ R(Y) /ʾaḥar(ē)/ ‘a er’, ʾL(Y) /ʾil(ē)/ (ʾεl) ‘toward’, ʾT /ʾi / (ʾēt) ‘together
with’, BYN /bēn/ ‘among’, MN /min/ ‘from’ (the /n/ assimilates ¯ to the

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 108 Holger Gzella

following consonant; monosyllabic singular suffixes are generally at-

tached to the longer base /mimmin-/ < */minmin-/), ʿD(Y) /ʿad(ē)/ ‘until,
to’, ʿL(Y) /ʿal(ē)/ ‘on, above, against’, ʿM /ʿimm/ (ʿīm) ‘with’. Further, some
nouns used adverbially act like prepositions: ʾṢ L /ʾiṣ l/ (ʾēṣ εl) ‘besides’, BʿD
/baʿd/ (báʿad) ‘behind’, TḤ T /taḥt/ (táḥat) ‘below’. Combinations of prep-
ositions and¯ nouns can produce compound ¯ prepositional expressions like
BD /bōd/ (< */bi-yad/) ‘by means of’, LPNY /la-panē/ (lip̄nē) ‘before’, etc.
Prepositions (originally) ending in /-ē/ (< /-ay/) take plural suffixes; simi-
larly /taḥt/, in all likelihood due to the influence of /ʿal(ē)/. The most fre-
quent adverbial ending is /-am/ (Tiberian -ām), which is o en understood
as a fossilized accusative case in /-a/ together with mimation.
Lʾ /lō/ serves as a general negation for nouns and adverbs; the
“short imperfect” denoting wishes, by contrast, takes the negation ʾL
/ʾal/ (mostly used for a punctual and specific prohibition, as opposed
to /lō/ with the “long imperfect” for general prohibitions, especially in
legal texts). Except for the compound /balī/ (blī) ‘without’, /bal/ (which
is quite normal in Phoenician) appears much less frequently in Hebrew.
The negative particle ʾYN /ʾēn/ ‘there is not’ acts as a counterpart to the
existential marker YŠ /yēš/ ‘there is’ and can take singular suffixes a er
/-an-/ (-εn-).
An object marker ʾT /ʾat/(?) (ʾεt), before suffixes /ʾōt/ (< */ʾāt/?), in
¯
part compensates for the loss of a morphological object case (the accu-
sative) and can optionally indicate the direct object of a transitive verb,
especially when the object is definite. It thus restores the distinction be-
tween the object and a (prototypical) subject. Personal names, which are
maximally definite, practically always take the object marker. In passive
constructions, it can, by analogy with the active counterpart, also high-
light the subject. Partial affectedness of an object is usually expressed with
the preposition /bi-/.
The most widespread conjunction, proclitic W /wa-/ (w) ‘and’, usually
connects clauses on the same level, but it can also introduce subordinate
clauses. Occasionally, it appears with disjunctive (‘or’) or, rarely, causal
relationships. ʾW /ʾō/ ‘or’, ʾP /ʾap/ ‘also’, and GM /gam(m)/ ‘also’ are like-
wise coordinating; subordinating conjunctions include ʾM /ʾim/ ‘if’ (with
“perfect” or “imperfect”; the apodosis is o en introduced by /wa-/); KY
/kī/ ‘because’; ‘that’ (regularly also with an asseverative nuance ‘yes!’ but
rarely used like /ʾim/); LW /lū/ (later ʾLW /ʾillū/), negated LWLY /lūlē/,
‘may’ (with “perfect,” “imperfect,” or imperative) or ‘if’ for unfulfilled or
unfulfillable conditions (mostly with the “perfect”); PN /pan/ ( pεn) ‘lest’;
and others. It is, however, mostly variation between verbal conjugations
which creates a certain structure in the discourse, not so much the oscil-
lation between main and subordinate clauses as in European languages.

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 Ancient Hebrew 109

Presentative markers like HN /hinn/ (hēn) and, especially, HNH

/hinnε̄/ (with object suffixes usually a ached to /-an-/ -εn-) ‘look!’ direct
the a ention of the hearer or reader to the emergence of a referent into
the speech situation or to the unfolding of a proposition in the discourse.
A participial clause is o en employed for dramatic vividness; /wa-hinnε̄/
can act as a marker of surprise (mirativity) or, with a following participle,
indicate that the speaker is an eyewitness (direct evidentiality), which
mostly occurs in prophetic passages. Other lexemes can also perform
presentative functions, just like existential and locative constructions.

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