Perfect and Imperfect

A Hebrew verb in any stem can be built in a handful of patterns that show who is acting and something about how the action is presented. The two main ones are the subject of this lesson. One adds endings after the root, as you saw in lesson 1: שָׁמַרְתִּי (shamarti, I kept), שָׁמְרוּ (shameru, they kept). The other adds prefixes before it: אֶהְיֶה (ehyeh, I will be), יִשְׁמֹר (yishmor, he will keep). The first is traditionally called the perfect and the second the imperfect.

Many modern grammars and commentaries prefer different names, and you will meet both, so learn them now. They call the perfect qatal and the imperfect yiqtol, after the shape each takes with the old model root קטל (q-t-l, to kill): qatal, he killed, and yiqtol, he will kill. The new names were adopted precisely because the old ones prejudge the question this lesson is about. Perfect and imperfect suggest complete and incomplete action; qatal and yiqtol suggest nothing but a shape. Your tools will mostly use perfect and imperfect, so this lesson does too, but when a commentary says qatal it means the perfect.

These two are not the only verb forms, and you should know their share. In the Open Scriptures tagging of the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), about 21 percent of Hebrew verb forms are perfects and about 20 percent imperfects. Another 21 percent are the narrative form wayyiqtol, which the next lesson treats, and about 8 percent are weqatal, a perfect with and that usually carries on a future or a command, as in Leviticus 19:2's 'and tell them'. The rest are participles, infinitives, commands and a few related forms, which lesson 6 introduces. So the perfect and imperfect between them make up about two verbs in every five you will tap.

How do translators usually render them? In plain prose, the perfect is most often an English past or present perfect: he kept, he has kept. The imperfect is most often a future or a should, may or must: he will keep, he should keep. If that were the whole story there would be no need for this lesson. It is not the whole story, and the exceptions are not rare.

Here are the patterns you will meet most often where the perfect does not mean past. With verbs of state, of knowing, loving, hating, being great or being holy, the perfect regularly describes a present state. Cain's lo yada'ti, 'I do not know' (Genesis 4:9), is a perfect. So is the verb in God's description of Isaac in Genesis 22:2, 'whom you love', אֲשֶׁר אָהַבְתָּ (asher ahavta). So is יְהוָה מָלָךְ (YHWH malakh), 'The LORD reigns' (Psalm 93:1). Then there is what grammarians call the performative perfect, where saying the thing does it: in Genesis 15:18 God says נָתַתִּי (natatti), 'I have given' this land, making the gift in the act of speaking. And then, most important for this lesson, there are perfects of future events in prophecy. In Numbers 24:17 Balaam says דָּרַךְ כּוֹכָב מִיַּעֲקֹב (darakh kokhav mi-ya'aqov), 'A star will come forth from Jacob', with a perfect. In Isaiah 5:13 the prophet says גָּלָה עַמִּי (galah ammi), 'My people will go into exile', with a perfect, of an exile still to come.

The imperfect wanders just as far. It describes what used to happen again and again: Job 1:5 ends כָּכָה יַעֲשֶׂה אִיּוֹב כָּל הַיָּמִים (kakhah ya'aseh iyyov kol ha-yamim, thus Job would do all the days), 'This was Job's regular practice'. In old poetry it often narrates the past: the Song of the Sea says of Pharaoh's army תְּהֹמֹת יְכַסְיֻמוּ (tehomot yekhasyumu), 'The depths have covered them' (Exodus 15:5), with an imperfect. It states general truths, asks what should be done, expresses wishes, and gives commands, as tihyu did in Leviticus 19:2.

And one verse can hold both. Isaiah 9:1, which in the Hebrew Bible is numbered 8:23, contrasts two times with two perfects: הֵקַל (heqal, he made light, he humbled) and הִכְבִּיד (hikhbid, he made heavy, he honoured). The BSB renders the first as a past, 'In the past He humbled', and the second as a future, 'in the future He will honor'. The KJV took the second differently, 'afterward did more grievously afflict her', as a past act of making heavy. The forms are identical in kind. The translators' decisions differ because the context has to supply what the forms do not.

None of this is disputed. Every grammarian accepts that these patterns exist. The dispute is about what they show: whether the forms mark time, with special uses that depart from it, or mark something else, with time coming from context. That is the same question the Koine Greek lesson Tense and Aspect asks of the Greek verb, and if you have read it, the shape of what follows will be familiar, though the Hebrew evidence is its own.

The first account is that the forms mark tense. This is the oldest view in the Christian and Jewish grammatical traditions, and in a refined form it has strong modern defenders. In outline: the perfect is a past, or more precisely an anterior, a form for what is prior to the time of speaking or to the time in view; the imperfect is a future and a modal form, for what will, may or should happen. Jan Joosten's The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew (2012) is the fullest recent statement. Joosten argues that the system is built on a contrast between indicative forms, which state facts and mark time, and modal forms, which express what is willed or expected, and that the participle carries the present. On this view the stative perfects are true pasts in Hebrew terms, a state entered into and still holding, as English I have come to know means I know; the habitual imperfect is modal, what Job would do; and the prophetic perfect is a past used as a figure, which works precisely because the form normally means past. The strength of this account is the evidence of prose: in the narrative books the forms line up with time overwhelmingly, the earliest translators into Greek mostly rendered them as tenses, and later Hebrew plainly used them as tenses. Its critics reply that it has to treat a large share of the uses, the stative, the habitual, the prophetic and the poetic, as special cases or figures.

The second account is that the forms mark aspect, the way an action is presented rather than when it happens. Heinrich Ewald in the nineteenth century and S. R. Driver in A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew (1874, third edition 1892) taught that the perfect presents an action as complete and the imperfect as incomplete, in process, or about to happen, with time supplied by context. Bruce Waltke and Michael O'Connor's An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (1990) took a broadly aspectual line, and John A. Cook's Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb (2012) argues the case with modern linguistics: the perfect is perfective, the imperfect imperfective, and the system shifted towards tense over the course of biblical Hebrew's history. The strength of this account is that one principle covers what the tense view treats as special uses. A perfect of a state presents the state as a whole fact; a perfect in prophecy presents a future event as a completed whole; an imperfect of Job's habit presents his practice as ongoing. No figure of speech is needed. Its critics reply that labels like complete and ongoing can be stretched to fit almost any use, and that in prose the forms track time too closely for time to be a mere by-product of context.

The third account says that both of the first two ask the wrong question. Wolfgang Schneider's grammar (1974), drawing on the German linguist Harald Weinrich, and Alviero Niccacci's The Syntax of the Verb in Classical Hebrew Prose (English edition 1990) argue that the forms work at the level of the whole text: certain forms carry the main line of a narrative, others carry background or speech, and the choice of form signals the kind of text and the place of a clause within it. Time and aspect follow from those roles. The strength of this account is that it explains why the same form behaves differently in stories, speeches and poems, and it has given readers useful tools for following the structure of a passage, which you will use in lesson 5. Its critics reply that it explains the distribution of the forms better than their meaning.

This debate is very much alive, and many reference grammars combine elements of all three. You do not need to settle it to read well. What all three accounts agree on is enough for a preacher. In prose the forms correlate strongly with time. In specific settings, with stative verbs, in prophecy, in poetry and in habitual description, the correlation regularly breaks. The English time in your Bible is the translator's judgment from the context. So when you read a verse, the question is never just what does the form mean; it is what does this form, in this kind of text, in this setting, most likely present.

Now the anchor, which the Hebrew Bible numbers 9:5. The WLC reads כִּי יֶלֶד יֻלַּד לָנוּ בֵּן נִתַּן לָנוּ (ki yeled yullad lanu, ben nittan lanu, for a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us). יֻלַּד (yullad) is from יָלַד (yalad, to bear, to give birth). The Open Scriptures tagging calls it a pual perfect, third person masculine singular; some grammarians think forms like it are remnants of an old passive of the qal, and you may see either label, but every tool agrees it is a passive perfect. נִתַּן (nittan) is a niphal perfect, third person masculine singular, of נָתַן (natan, to give). Then וַתְּהִי הַמִּשְׂרָה עַל שִׁכְמוֹ (wattehi ha-misrah al shikhmo, and the government came to be, or will be, upon his shoulder) and וַיִּקְרָא שְׁמוֹ (wayyiqra shemo, and he called, or one will call, his name), both wayyiqtol forms, followed by the four titles. The verb of calling is active in Hebrew, with no subject named; the BSB, like most English versions, renders it 'He will be called', which is the usual way to put an unnamed subject into English.

So the verbs of the birth are perfects and the next two verbs are narrative forms. The BSB renders the perfects 'is born', 'is given', keeping the KJV's familiar present, and the narrative forms as futures, 'will be', 'will be called'. Why? There are two main answers, and Christians and Jews, scholars and pastors, are found on both sides of the first part of the question.

The first answer is that these are prophetic perfects. Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, in the 1910 English edition, gave this use its classic name: the prophet speaks of a future event in the perfect because he sees it as already accomplished, so certain is it in God's purpose. Isaiah uses the perfect this way elsewhere, as in 5:13, and so does Balaam in Numbers 24:17. The passage is full of future signals: 9:1 promises honour in the future, 9:7 says there will be no end to his government and he will reign on David's throne forever, and the titles, especially אֵל גִּבּוֹר (el gibbor, Mighty God), the same title Isaiah gives the LORD himself in 10:21, describe a king no merely human son of David has been. On this reading the child is the Messiah, the perfects express the certainty of his coming, and Matthew's statement that Isaiah 9:1-2 was fulfilled in Jesus' ministry in Galilee (Matthew 4:12-16) and the angel's echo of 9:7 in Luke 1:32-33 are not reinterpretations but recognitions. This is the historic Christian reading, and those who hold it point out that it explains the titles far better than any king of Judah does.

The second answer is that the perfects are real pasts, or at least real present events in Isaiah's day: the oracle celebrates a royal child already born, or a king's accession, which in the language of Psalm 2:7 is a kind of birth: 'today I have become Your Father', where the verb is also a perfect of yalad. Rashi, the great medieval Jewish commentator, read the child as Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, and took the titles as names of God, who calls the child Prince of Peace, which is possible because the verb of calling is active with an unnamed subject. Many modern scholars, Christian and Jewish, read the passage as a coronation hymn for a king of Judah, and the Jewish Publication Society's translation (1985) renders the whole verse in the past. The strength of this reading is grammatical and historical: the perfects and wayyiqtols are the normal forms for past events, the surrounding perfects of 9:2-4 describe a deliverance as already happening, and Isaiah's prophecies in chapters 7 to 9 are addressed to the crisis under Ahaz. Many Christians who hold this view add that the near fulfilment points beyond itself: the king hailed in Isaiah's day never measured up to the titles, and the passage waited for the one who did, which is how Matthew and Luke can read it. Others who hold it do not accept that last step.

Notice what the aspect account does to this debate. On that account there is no special prophetic perfect to argue about: a perfect presents an event as a complete whole, and in a prophecy the context makes the whole future. The tense account, by contrast, needs the prophetic perfect as a figure. So your view of the Hebrew verb affects how you describe 9:6, but it does not settle the question of reference. A tense reader can hold that Isaiah used a past figuratively of the Messiah, or literally of Hezekiah; an aspect reader can hold that the complete whole is a future birth or a recent one. What the verbs alone settle is that the birth is presented as a fact, and the reign as following from it. Who the child is, and when, has to be decided from the passage, the book and, for Christians, the New Testament's reading of both.

When you tap a verb, the tool gives you the conjugation along with the stem. Blue Letter Bible writes perfect, imperfect, wayyiqtol (or consecutive imperfect) and so on in words; STEP Bible and the parsing codes you learned in module 2 use short labels. Write them out in full in your notebook, and if your tools use different names for the same form, as they may for the forms with and in front, note both names once so they stop confusing you.

Then do what this lesson has done with Isaiah 9. Put the conjugation beside the English time and ask whether they match. Where they do, as most will in a story, move on. Where they do not, ask which of the patterns in section 2 explains the mismatch: a verb of state, a performative, a prophecy, a habit, old poetry, a command. Very often you will find one that fits, and when you cannot, that is a good place to open a commentary.

And compare translations. If two respected versions give a verse different English times, the reason is almost always a judgment about the verb in its context, like the BSB and KJV on Isaiah 9:1 or the BSB and the Jewish Publication Society on 9:6. Module 2's lesson on comparing Old Testament translations showed you how to find those differences; this lesson has shown you why many of them happen. When you preach a verse whose time is disputed, say so briefly and give your reason. Your hearers will trust you more for it, not less.

Open your verb table. Add two columns: Conjugation and Time in my Bible. For every verb in your passage, copy the conjugation the tool gives, written in full words, and then write past, present or future for the English time your Bible uses. For commands write command; for participles and infinitives leave the Time column empty for now.

Now look only at the perfects and imperfects. Put a ring round every one whose English time does not match the usual pattern: a perfect rendered as a present or future, or an imperfect rendered as a past. For each ringed verb, write in the margin which pattern from section 2 you think explains it: state, performative, prophecy, habit, poetry or command. If none fits, write a question mark.

Then choose the ringed verb on which the most depends for your sermon or study. Open your passage in a second translation on your phone, the KJV if you have nothing else, and see whether it gives the same English time. Write two sentences in your notebook. The first begins: The form is. The second begins: The time comes from. If the two translations differ, add a third sentence saying which you would follow and why.

If your passage has no ringed verbs at all, it is probably plain narrative, and the next lesson is written for it. In that case, choose the first perfect and the first imperfect in your passage and write the same two sentences for each, so that the habit is in place.