Reading Hebrew Parsing Codes

Ezra 7 introduces Ezra slowly. First comes his ancestry, sixteen names running back to Aaron the chief priest. Then comes his trade: he was 'a scribe skilled in the Law of Moses' (7:6). Then the king's favour, the journey, and twice the reason for his success: the hand of his God was upon him (7:6, 7:9). Only then does verse 10 open the man's heart. In the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) it reads כִּי עֶזְרָא הֵכִין לְבָבוֹ (ki ezra hekhin levavo, for Ezra had set his heart), followed by three verbs: לִדְרוֹשׁ (lidrosh, to seek, to study), וְלַעֲשֹׂת (vela'asot, and to do), וּלְלַמֵּד (ulelammed, and to teach).

The order is the sermon. Ezra did not set his heart to teach and then study in order to have something to say. He studied, he practised what he found, and then he taught. A teacher who reverses that order may still say true things, but he is handing on what he has not handled. The Koine Greek track's lesson Greek in the Study builds a weekly routine on this same verse, and it is worth reading beside this one. This lesson stays with the smallest part of Ezra's first verb, to seek: the identification of each word's form, which is where careful study of the text begins.

Notice one more thing before the codes. Ezra 7:12-26, the king's letter that follows, is not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, the language of the Persian government, as Module 1 explained. The tools mark the change for you, as you will see in section 3. So Ezra 7 is a good chapter on which to learn to read codes: it has Hebrew narrative, a Hebrew verse packed with verbs, and an Aramaic letter.

A tagged Hebrew Bible is one in which every word has been labelled with its dictionary form and its grammatical form. Labelling all the words of the Old Testament, with their prefixes and suffixes, is the work of years, and it has been done more than once by different teams. The free tools you are using draw on two of those efforts.

Blue Letter Bible's Hebrew grammar codes use the system of the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible, a project that has tagged the WLC and released its work under an open licence. Blue Letter Bible publishes the key to the codes on its site, under its Hebrew morphology resources. The Open Scriptures codes are similar in style to the older Westminster codes used in commercial Bible software, so what you learn here will serve you elsewhere.

STEP Bible's THOT text was prepared by Tyndale House in Cambridge. Its version information says that its grammatical tagging is based on a different database, built over decades at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam by the team now called the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer (ETCBC), and converted into codes in the Open Scriptures style. STEP rarely shows you its codes; it spells the grammar out in words in the side panel.

That is a gift to a student. When Blue Letter Bible and STEP Bible agree about a word, two teams working from different databases have reached the same judgment, and you can lean on it. When they disagree, you have found a place where the Hebrew is genuinely open, or where one team has made a slip, and either way you have found something worth investigating. Section 5 shows what that looks like.

Every code begins with a language letter: H for Hebrew or A for Aramaic. That letter appears once, at the very start, even when the word has several pieces. The pieces are then separated by slashes, in the order they appear in the word. So HC/Vqc is Hebrew, then a conjunction, then a verb; and HR/Ncfsc/Sp2ms is Hebrew, then a preposition, then a noun, then a suffix. Open any verse of the king's letter in Ezra 7:12-26 and you will see the codes begin with A instead of H.

After the language letter, each piece begins with a capital letter for its part of speech: V verb, N noun, A adjective, P pronoun, R preposition, C conjunction, D adverb, T particle, S suffix. Particles are the small words that do not change their form, and a second, small letter says which kind: To is the direct object marker אֵת (et), Td the article the, Tn a negative such as not, Tr the relative word אֲשֶׁר (asher, who or which), Ti a question word. So HTd/Ncmsa is the, then a noun.

A verb code has the pattern V, stem, form, person, gender, number. The stem letters you will meet most are q for qal, N for niphal, p for piel, P for pual, h for hiphil, H for hophal and t for hithpael; there are rarer ones, such as o for polel. The form letters are p for perfect (qatal), i for imperfect (yiqtol), w for the narrative form usually called wayyiqtol, q for the form usually called weqatal, v for imperative, j for jussive, h for cohortative, r for active participle, s for passive participle, a for infinitive absolute and c for infinitive construct. Then come person (1, 2 or 3), gender (m masculine, f feminine, c common to both) and number (s singular, p plural, d dual). So HVhp3ms reads: Hebrew, verb, hiphil, perfect, third person, masculine, singular. The Open Scriptures project calls the wayyiqtol and weqatal forms sequential imperfect and sequential perfect, names that describe where the forms stand rather than settle what they mean, which scholars still debate. Module 4 sets out that debate.

Participles and infinitives do not take person. A participle code gives gender, number and state instead, so HVqrmpa is a qal active participle, masculine plural, absolute. An infinitive construct is simply HVqc. A noun code gives a type (c common noun, p proper name, g gentilic), then gender, number and state: Ncmsa is a common noun, masculine singular absolute, and Ncfsc a feminine singular construct, the form a noun takes when it means law of rather than law. A noun with a suffix attached is coded as construct. A suffix code gives its type, usually p for pronominal, then person, gender and number: Sp3ms means his, Sp1cs my, Sp2ms your addressed to a man.

Two warnings will save you many mistakes. First, capital and small letters are different letters. In the stem slot, h is hiphil and H is hophal, p is piel and P is pual, q is qal and Q is the rare qal passive. On a phone, look closely. Second, the same letter means different things in different slots. N at the front of a piece is noun, but straight after V it is niphal. P at the front is pronoun, but after V it is pual. Small p can mean piel, perfect, plural, proper name or pronominal, depending on where it stands. Small c can mean common noun, construct state, infinitive construct or common gender. Position is everything, which is why it is worth writing the pattern inside the cover of your notebook until you no longer need it. When in doubt, tap the code: Blue Letter Bible's panel spells out every piece.

Here is the whole verse as Blue Letter Bible codes it. כִּי (ki, for) is HC, a conjunction. עֶזְרָא (ezra, Ezra) is HNp, a proper name. הֵכִין (hekhin, he set, he prepared) is HVhp3ms: hiphil perfect, third person masculine singular, from the root כון (k-w-n), whose basic sense is to be firm or established; in the hiphil it means to establish, prepare or make ready. Ezra had made his heart ready. The BSB's 'had set' uses an English past perfect because verse 10 explains what lay behind the events of verses 1-9; the Hebrew perfect does not itself say 'had', and choosing the English tense is the translator's judgment from context.

לְבָבוֹ (levavo, his heart) is HNcmsc/Sp3ms: a common noun, masculine singular, in construct because a suffix is attached, then the suffix his. Then come the three purposes. לִדְרוֹשׁ (lidrosh, to seek) is HR/Vqc: the preposition לְ (le, to) and a qal infinitive construct of דרשׁ (d-r-sh). אֶת (et) is HTo, the object marker, with nothing in the English. תּוֹרַת יְהוָה (torat YHWH, the law of the LORD) is HNcfsc then HNp: law of, in construct, then the name. וְלַעֲשֹׂת (vela'asot, and to do) is HC/R/Vqc: and, to, qal infinitive construct of עשׂה (to do, make). וּלְלַמֵּד (ulelammed, and to teach) is HC/R/Vpc: and, to, and this time a piel infinitive construct. בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל (beyisra'el, in Israel) is HR/Np. חֹק (hoq, statute) and וּמִשְׁפָּט (umishpat, and ordinance) are HNcmsa and HC/Ncmsa, both singular.

Look at the third verb. Its root is למד (l-m-d), and the stem letter is p, piel. The same root in the qal means to learn; in the piel it means to teach. Psalm 119 shows both within a few lines. In 119:7 the psalmist will praise God 'when I learn Your righteous judgments', a qal; in 119:12 he prays 'teach me Your statutes', a piel. Deuteronomy 4:10 has both in one verse: the people are to hear God's words 'so that they may learn to fear Me' and 'that they may teach them to their children'. One letter in the code tells you whether Ezra was learning or teaching. He was doing both, and verse 10 puts them in the right order.

Look also at the first verb's root. כון (k-w-n), which Ezra used of setting his heart, appears in Psalm 119:90 in a different stem: 'You established the earth, and it endures.' Blue Letter Bible codes that verb with o, polel. The God who makes the earth firm is the God who makes a heart ready. That kind of connection is exactly what a code helps you find and exactly what you must test before preaching it, because sharing a root does not make two verses say the same thing. Here the link is modest and real: both speak of something made firm.

Now open Psalm 119:10 on both tools: 'With all my heart I have sought You; do not let me stray from Your commandments.' The verb behind 'do not let me stray' is תַּשְׁגֵּנִי (tashgeni, cause me to stray), from שׁגה (sh-g-h), to wander or go astray, in the hiphil, the causative stem. Blue Letter Bible codes it HVhj2ms/Sp1cs: hiphil jussive, second person masculine singular, with the suffix me. STEP Bible's data tags it as an ordinary hiphil imperfect, which STEP calls imperfective, without marking it as a jussive.

Who is right? Both are being honest about different things. Hebrew has a short form of the imperfect, the jussive, used for wishes and indirect commands, but in many verbs, and in this verb with the ending for me attached, nothing in the spelling distinguishes it from the ordinary imperfect. STEP's tag stays with what the spelling shows. Blue Letter Bible's data has gone a step further and read the syntax: the verb follows אַל (al, not), the negative Hebrew normally uses with wishes, requests and prohibitions, and the line is a prayer. That makes jussive the better reading. The translation is the same either way, and that is worth saying aloud: most disagreements between taggers change nothing in English. But some do, and the habit of checking is what lets you tell the difference.

Some differences are not judgments at all but differences of system. STEP folds several rare stems into the common ones, so the verb in Psalm 119:90 that Blue Letter Bible calls polel appears on STEP as piel. STEP calls the perfect and imperfect perfective and imperfective, and any English tense it suggests beside them, such as past or present, depends on context and is not definite. If you ever download STEP's underlying data, you will find its codes look like the Open Scriptures codes but use a few letters differently, so never carry a code from one system into another without checking its key. The safest rule is simple: compare what the tools say in words, not the letters.

When you find a real disagreement, do three things. First, read both descriptions in full and write down exactly where they differ: stem, form, person, or something else. Second, look at the verse for evidence: a negative such as אַל, a preceding command, a sequence of narrative verbs, the subject of the sentence. Third, if the difference would change the English, check how two or three translations render the verse and, if you can, a commentary on the Hebrew. Then record your judgment with its reason, and mark it as a judgment. That is not a failure of the tools. It is what the Levites in Nehemiah 8:8 were doing, 'explaining it and giving insight', and it is the work Ezra set his heart to do.

Go back to the passage you chose in Module 1. Make a list of every verb in it, using Blue Letter Bible's codes to find them: every code with a V in it is a verb, including participles and infinitives. Do not skip the little ones joined to and.

For each verb write five things on one line: the Hebrew word as printed; Blue Letter Bible's code; the code spelled out in plain words, stem first; STEP Bible's description of the same word; and its root. Where the two tools agree, put a tick at the end of the line. Where they differ in a way that is only a difference of system, such as polel and piel, put a small s. Where they make different judgments, such as jussive and imperfect, put a star.

For each star, write two sentences: what each tool says, and what in the verse helps you decide. If nothing in the verse decides it, say so, and note whether the difference would change the English. Finally, read your list of stems from top to bottom. If your passage has a cluster of piel or hiphil verbs, or a run of narrative forms, write one sentence on what you notice. You do not yet know what every stem does. Module 4 will teach you. For now you are learning to see, and seeing comes before explaining.