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    Hebrew Weak Verb Cheat Sheet

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    Benjamin Gordon
    This document provides a "cheat sheet" with rules to help identify the root letters and forms of weak verbs in Hebrew. It outlines three main steps: 1) Identify letters at the beginning and end that are not root letters. 2) Try inserting, changing, or deleting certain letters to find the root if it is not obvious. 3) Additional rules to distinguish between similar forms, like using pointing to tell lamed-he perfect and imperfect forms apart. The goal is to enable translating Hebrew verbs into English without needing to fully memorize all the complex verb rules.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Hebrew Weak Verb Cheat Sheet

    Uploaded by

    Benjamin Gordon
    190 views1 page
    This document provides a "cheat sheet" with rules to help identify the root letters and forms of weak verbs in Hebrew. It outlines three main steps: 1) Identify letters at the beginning and end that are not root letters. 2) Try inserting, changing, or deleting certain letters to find the root if it is not obvious. 3) Additional rules to distinguish between similar forms, like using pointing to tell lamed-he perfect and imperfect forms apart. The goal is to enable translating Hebrew verbs into English without needing to fully memorize all the complex verb rules.

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    verbos em hebraico

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    This document provides a "cheat sheet" with rules to help identify the root letters and forms of weak verbs in Hebrew. It outlines three main steps: 1) Identify letters at the beginning and end that are not root letters. 2) Try inserting, changing, or deleting certain letters to find the root if it is not obvious. 3) Additional rules to distinguish between similar forms, like using pointing to tell lamed-he perfect and imperfect forms apart. The goal is to enable translating Hebrew verbs into English without needing to fully memorize all the complex verb rules.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    190 views1 page

    Hebrew Weak Verb Cheat Sheet

    Uploaded by

    Benjamin Gordon
    This document provides a "cheat sheet" with rules to help identify the root letters and forms of weak verbs in Hebrew. It outlines three main steps: 1) Identify letters at the beginning and end that are not root letters. 2) Try inserting, changing, or deleting certain letters to find the root if it is not obvious. 3) Additional rules to distinguish between similar forms, like using pointing to tell lamed-he perfect and imperfect forms apart. The goal is to enable translating Hebrew verbs into English without needing to fully memorize all the complex verb rules.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Hebrew Weak Verb Cheat Sheet

    Lots of theological students find Hebrew a bit baffling. Especially weak verbs. Way back in the day, I was one of them.
    James Robson, our lecturer at that time, was (and is) an utterly outstanding teacher, and produced dozens of full-colour
    sheets designed to help us chart a course through the minefield of weak verb paradigms. Some of my fellow-students
    even managed to learn them. Yikes - there were some smart folks in that class. But not everyone has the neck muscles to
    support the planet-sized brain necessary to memorize all that stuff.
    Fortunately, it turns out that there’s an easier way. If you think about it, you don’t actually need to learn all of the rules
    for forming Hebrew verbs if your only aim is to translate from Hebrew to English. The range of possible meanings for
    any given verb is constrained both by the root letters that remain and by the context. This means that if you have a good
    grasp of Hebrew vocabulary, and if you’re sufficiently experienced at actually reading the Hebrew Bible to have a
    reasonable idea of the context, then a few simple rules will enable you to identify the root letters of almost every weak
    verb in the Hebrew Bible. You won’t impress your purist friends, but you should at least pass the exam, and you might
    even find yourself able to read the Hebrew Bible. Now there’s a neat idea.
    1. Top and tail
    Look out for these letters at the beginning and the end of the word. They may be preformatives, afformatives or
    pronominal suffixes, rather than root letters. Also note that participles take standard noun endings in the feminine and
    plural forms.
    Perfect Imperfect
    Preformatives h aytn
    Afformatives h t yti Wn ~t, !t, W W hn"
    Pronominal suffixes ~k ~h ~ !k ! $ ynI w Wh Wn

    2. Unrecognisable root letters


    If you can’t spot the verb root after step 1 (either because you don’t recognise the root letters or because there aren’t
    enough of them), try inserting, changing or deleting the following letters in the positions shown. This will give you
    several options to try, one of which will almost certainly be right.
    3RL 2RL 1RL
    Geminate Repeat 2RL Hollow verbs yw Pe-yod / waw w→y
    h Hifil hollow
    y→w $lh (like a pe-waw) h
    Lamed-he verbs
    ty→h
    Pe-nun (if dagesh forte in 2RL) n
    Hollow, geminates: delete y w
    xql (like a pe-nun) l
    between root and cons suffix

    3. Other things
    This section describes how to tell the difference between different forms that might otherwise be confused. It doesn’t
    distinguish between every form, just those that are more common where a difference in meaning would result from the
    difference. And it doesn’t describe all the differences between the forms noted, just enough to distinguish them. The
    number in brackets gives the number of times each rule will be needed in reading the OT. Bear in mind that a feature
    will occur approximately 100 times if it appears 1 – 2 times in the shorter books and 2 – 3 times in the longer books.
    (2500) Lamed-he pointing: per h ' ; imp h , ; impv h e ; inf abs h O ; inf con t O
    (2500) Pe-guttural imp: nifal 1RL pointing is always " ; qal is never "
    (1700) Lamed-he per (3RL h → y ): active stems y i ; passive stems y E
    (1300) Ayin guttural per: Piel 1 RL pointing is always E ; qal is never E
    (680) Hollow verbs: qal active participle = 3ms perfect mq'
    (250) Ayin-guttural imp and impv: nifal always has DF in 1RL; no other stems do.
    (100s) Ayin guttural per and imp: pual 1RL pointing is always o; piel never is.
    (41) Pe-aleph qal imperfect 1cs: No a preformative: r:mao

    Steve Jeffery, 2010 [email protected]

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