Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

Some books on New Testament Greek and New Testament translation mention what
they call the "Semitic Passive". For example, in "Translating the Word of
God" (Zondervan 1974) my SIL colleagues Beekman and Callow wrote (p.214):
"In the gospels, it is not uncommon to find that a passive construction has
been used to avoid the necessity of naming God as the subject of the action.
It is a type of euphemism, therefore, which the Jews had developed because
of a reluctance to pronounce the divine Name. The original readers readily
understood from the context when God was the subject of the action expressed
in the passive voice... it will be noted that such passives are confined to
the gospels, and almost exclusively to Jesus' own teaching".

My questions are these: Is it correct to call construction this a "Semitic
Passive" (a potentially emotive name, especially if it can be traced back to
older German scholars)? Is it, or its equivalent, found in Biblical Hebrew?
Or post-Biblical Hebrew? Or in any other Semitic language? Or in LXX? Or in
other Jewish literature in any language? Or is it perhaps idiosyncratic to
the gospels or even to the teaching of Jesus?

Peter Kirk