Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

>> Do you claim that the   pa`al   or   hif`il  means 'to take away ...'?
>> And whichever is which,  then what do you claim for the other?
>> Or do you claim that the pa`al and hif`il   mean the same?
>>

...
> If the qal and niphal conjugate for active,
> piel and pual for stative,
> hiphil and hophal for causative,
> and hitpael for reflexive,
> then what would anyone expect a hiphil NCL to mean
> when the qal means to take away.

OK.
I hear you affirming that *netsol (qal inf.)
means 'to take away'.


> But don’t expect this to map cleanly onto English, after all,
> we’re discussing Biblical Hebrew here.


But of course, BH. At least I would hope so.
And since you just said that

> conjugate ... hiphil and hophal for causative,


I hear you saying that the verb hatsil,
as an active causative to the passive causative hof`al,
would be broadly in the range of meaning:
    'to cause someone/something to take away   '.

Would you like to fix that up, refine it a bit?

And do you believe that that is what hatsil means in BH?


To move the thread along a bit, I will add what I think.
Personally, I don't think that the definition that
you took from your concordance and applied to a qal
can have a causative plug-in added to it and still
be justified for hatsil.

"to take away",
but misses the mark for a qal *netsol
to about the degree that 'come' and 'bring' are different.
In other words, it would be like applying the meaning 'bring'
to the qal בוא bo'.

I happen to think that it is hatsil that means
'to take away . . .', not *netsol.
Imagine that
-- hatsil means 'to take away . . ., not *netsol.

*netsol, should it have existed -- but it hasn't been
attested during the whole 3000+ history of the language,
would have meant something in the neighborhood of
'to be safe'.
However, this is one of those 'middle' verbs that appears
to be used as a nif`al as
'to get away safe, escape, get saved'.
nitsal (nif`al) is a synonym of nimlat,
(also a nif`al orphan without any *malaT).

Anyway, "to take to a safe place, to deliver, to rescue"
 is how I read le-hatsil,
including
hitsil, wayyatsel, wayyatsilehu, yatsil, yatsilehu, etc.
I don't deny that it has a causative etymology. I am
merely pointing out that one should not take the meaning
of a hif`il verb and attribute that 'hif`il meaning' to a qal.


--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicallanguagecenter.com
www.biblicalulpan.org
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