The Basic Stem (Qal)

Every Hebrew verb appears in one of a small number of patterns that the grammars call stems. Lesson 3 introduces them all. This lesson is about the first, which is the most common by far. Its name, qal, is the Hebrew word קַל (qal, light), and it means the light or simple stem: the form of the verb with nothing extra built into it. Grammarians name the other stems after the shape the verb פָּעַל (pa'al, to do) takes in each, so you will hear of the niphal, the piel, the hiphil and so on, but the basic stem is simply called light.

It is light in another sense too: it does most of the work. In the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible, the free morphological tagging of the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) that several of your tools draw on, there are a little over seventy-three thousand Hebrew verb forms, and about fifty thousand of them, roughly 69 percent, are qal. More than two Hebrew verbs in every three you tap will be in the basic stem. That is why the lexicon gives the qal meaning first, and why, when you meet a verb in another stem, the first question is usually what the root means in the qal and what the other stem has done to it.

What does the qal mean? It gives the plain sense of the root, and that sense can be of two kinds. Most qal verbs are what grammarians call fientive, or verbs of action: שָׁמַר (shamar, he kept or guarded), כָּתַב (katav, he wrote), הָלַךְ (halakh, he walked). Some are stative, verbs of state or condition, listed in the lexicons as כָּבֵד (kaved, to be heavy), קָדַשׁ (qadash, to be holy), and רוּם (rum, to be high), which you will meet in the anchor. A stative qal is not passive, and a fientive qal is not always transitive. The qal is not the active voice; it is the basic stem, and whatever the root means at its simplest is what the qal says.

That has a consequence for reading English Bibles. Translators often have to render a stative qal with an English passive or with the verb be, because English has no single word for it. So when your Bible says 'I will be exalted', do not assume that the Hebrew is a passive form. It may be a qal meaning I will be high, which is exactly what it is in Psalm 46:10. The English voice tells you about English; the tool's stem tells you about Hebrew.

You do not need to memorise a full table of endings to use the tools well, but you will read faster if you can recognise the main qal shapes. Here they are on the root שׁמר (sh-m-r, keep, guard, watch), every form taken from the WLC as it stands. In the perfect: שָׁמַר (shamar, he kept), שָׁמַרְתָּ (shamarta, you kept), שָׁמַרְתִּי (shamarti, I kept), שָׁמְרוּ (shameru, they kept). In the imperfect: יִשְׁמֹר (yishmor, he will keep), תִּשְׁמֹר (tishmor, you will keep), יִשְׁמְרוּ (yishmeru, they will keep). The command: שְׁמֹר (shemor, keep!). The participle: שֹׁמֵר (shomer, keeping, or one who keeps). The infinitive with the little preposition to: לִשְׁמֹר (lishmor, to keep).

Look at what these have in common, because it is how you will recognise a qal on sight. The three root letters sit there plainly, with no extra letter before the first one except the person prefix of the imperfect, and no dot doubling the middle letter. The perfect has a, a under its first two letters, as in shamar. The imperfect has an i vowel under its prefix, as in yishmor. The participle has an o vowel after its first letter, as in shomer. These patterns bend for weak roots, as you saw with hayah in lesson 1, but in a strong root they are reliable, and when you see them you can expect the tool to say qal.

The participle deserves a word of its own because it works as a verb, an adjective and a noun all at once. In Genesis 4:9 Cain asks הֲשֹׁמֵר אָחִי אָנֹכִי (ha-shomer achi anokhi, am I my brother's keeper?): shomer, a qal participle, is a keeper, someone who keeps. Job 19:25 puts three qal forms side by side. The WLC reads וַאֲנִי יָדַעְתִּי גֹּאֲלִי חָי (wa'ani yada'ti go'ali chai, and I, I know my redeemer lives). יָדַעְתִּי (yada'ti, I know) is a qal perfect, rendered as an English present, because with a verb of knowing the perfect expresses a state the speaker is in; lesson 4 will say more. גֹּאֲלִי (go'ali, my redeemer) is a qal participle of גָּאַל (ga'al, to redeem) used as a noun, with the suffix my. And the verse ends יָקוּם (yaqum, he will stand), a qal imperfect.

When a tool shows you a qal, then, you already know three things. You are looking at the plain sense of the root. The lexicon's first block of meanings is the one to read. And the English, whatever voice or time it uses, is a translation decision you can now check against the form.

Now the anchor. The WLC numbers it 46:11, because the Hebrew counts the psalm's title as verse 1, and some tools follow that numbering. It reads: הַרְפּוּ וּדְעוּ כִּי אָנֹכִי אֱלֹהִים (harpu u-de'u ki anokhi elohim, let go and know that I am God), and then אָרוּם בַּגּוֹיִם אָרוּם בָּאָרֶץ (arum ba-goyim, arum ba-arets, I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth).

Take the qal verbs first. וּדְעוּ (u-de'u) is the conjunction and on a qal imperative, second person masculine plural, of יָדַע (yada', to know). It is a root that loses its first letter, the yod, in the imperative, which is why you see only two letters and a vowel. Yada' has a wide range in the qal: to know a fact, to recognise, to acknowledge, to know a person, and in a few places to know sexually. A popular sermon habit is to load every use with the last or with a vague intimacy. In 46:10 the clause that follows tells you what kind of knowing is meant: know that I am God, a recognition of who is in charge. The other qal is אָרוּם (arum), qal imperfect first person common singular of רוּם (rum, to be high). It is a stative qal, I will be high, and the BSB's 'I will be exalted' is the natural English for it.

Then the verb that comes first. הַרְפּוּ (harpu) is not qal. Every standard tool parses it as hiphil imperative, second person masculine plural, of רָפָה (raphah). You will learn in the next lesson what the hiphil is; for now it is enough to see what this verb does in its two common stems. In the qal it means to sink, to drop, to go slack. In 2 Samuel 4:1, when Saul's son hears that Abner is dead, the Hebrew says וַיִּרְפּוּ יָדָיו (wayyirpu yadav, and his hands went slack), which the BSB renders 'he lost courage'. In the hiphil it means to let something drop, to let go, to leave off. Samuel's 'Stop!' to Saul in 1 Samuel 15:16 is this verb, הֶרֶף (hereph). So is the LORD's command to the destroying angel in 2 Samuel 24:16, 'Enough! Withdraw your hand now!', literally let your hand drop. And so, with a negative, is Moses' promise in Deuteronomy 31:6, 'He will never leave you', where the Hebrew is לֹא יַרְפְּךָ (lo yarpekha, he will not let you go), echoed in God's own first-person promise in Joshua 1:5 and quoted in Hebrews 13:5.

Put that beside the English 'Be still'. The KJV has the same words, and they are not wrong: to stop, to let your hands drop, is to become still. But the Hebrew is not a word for silence or for calm feelings. Hebrew has a verb for that, דָּמַם (damam, to be silent), which is what Aaron does in Leviticus 10:3 when 'Aaron remained silent'. The verb in Psalm 46:10 is a verb of stopping and letting go. Some modern translations bring this out; the NASB, for example, renders it as a command to cease striving. The question it raises is obvious once you see it: let go of what, and who is being told to stop?

On this, careful readers of the psalm divide, and each view has real strength in the text.

The first view is that God is speaking to the nations, and to their armies in particular. Its case runs like this. The verse comes straight after a scene of war being ended: nations rage, kingdoms crumble, and the LORD makes wars cease, breaks the bow, shatters the spear and burns the shields. Then a voice says: Stop! The hiphil of raphah is exactly the word for telling someone to leave off what they are doing, as Samuel did to Saul and as the LORD did to the angel with his sword out over Jerusalem. The second half of the verse names the sphere of the speech: I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth. On this reading, 46:10 is a command to the world's warmakers to drop their weapons and acknowledge that the God of Jacob, not they, is God. Many commentators on the Psalms take this view, and it gives the verse a hard edge that the greeting-card use loses.

The second view is that the command is for God's own people, the ones singing the psalm. Its case is equally textual. The whole psalm is the congregation's song: God is our refuge, we will not fear though the mountains fall, the LORD of Hosts is with us. The refrain in 46:7 and 46:11 wraps round the divine speech, so that the people who hear God say I am God are the people who have just been told to come and see his works (46:8). And the hiphil can mean letting go of more than weapons. Israel was tempted again and again to trust alliances and horses rather than God, as Isaiah 31:1 complains, and the call to stop striving and recognise who God is fits that temptation exactly. On this reading the verse is a word to anxious believers: let go of your frantic efforts to save yourselves, and know that I am God.

A third view holds that the address is deliberately open. The imperatives are plural and no one is named. The psalm moves from Jerusalem's song to the whole earth and back, and God's voice, when it comes, speaks over the heads of all of them: the nations are commanded to stop their war, and the people of God, overhearing, are taught what their refuge really is. Some readers who take this view point out that Hebrew poetry often lets one speech serve two audiences, and that the refrain, the LORD of Hosts is with us, is the people's answer to a word that was not only for them.

You do not have to choose before you preach the psalm, but you do have to be honest about what the verb is. Whichever audience you take, the command is to stop and let go, followed by a command to recognise God. That is not opposed to quiet prayer. A believer who lets go of his own striving may well find himself quiet before God. But the verse is not, first of all, about quietness. It is about the end of resistance, whether the resistance of armies or the restless self-reliance of God's people, and about God being exalted over both.

This one verse shows why the stem column matters. If you had read only the English, you would naturally have assumed that be still and know are a matched pair of simple commands. The tools show you that they are not. One is a qal of a common verb; the other is a hiphil of a verb whose qal means something rather different, go slack, and whose hiphil means let go. A preacher who knows that much is protected from building a sermon on a sense the word does not have.

It also shows the limits of what the stem tells you. Knowing that harpu is a hiphil does not tell you whether it is addressed to the nations or to Israel; that is a question about the psalm, settled, so far as it can be, by reading the whole psalm. Knowing that arum is a qal does not tell you how God will be exalted among the nations; the psalm's answer, in 46:9, is by ending their wars. The grammar narrows the possibilities and protects you from mistakes. The context does the rest. That is the pattern you saw with ehyeh in lesson 1, and you will see it in every lesson of this module.

A last practical point. When you tap a verb and the tool says qal, read the first block of the lexicon entry, the one marked Qal. When it says anything else, find the root's qal meaning first and then read the block for the stem the tool gave you. Blue Letter Bible's Gesenius and Brown-Driver-Briggs entries are divided by stem in exactly this way, so the habit costs nothing, and it is the habit that caught harpu.

Go back to the verb table you began in lesson 1. Add a column after Strong's number and head it Stem. For every verb in your passage, copy the stem the tool gives you: qal, or whatever other name appears. You do not need to understand the other stems yet. Just write the name.

Then count. How many of your verbs are qal? Write the number and the total at the foot of the column. If your passage is typical, about two in three will be qal. If it is far from that, write a sentence wondering why: a passage of commands and worship may be heavy in other stems, a plain story may be heavy in qal.

Next, for every qal verb in your passage, open the lexicon entry on your phone and read only the block marked Qal. In a new column headed Qal meaning, write the meaning or meanings that fit the verse, in no more than five words. Where the English in your Bible uses a passive or the verb be for a qal, as 'I will be exalted' does, put a small star: that is a stative qal, or an intransitive one, rendered as English needs.

Finally, choose one verb in your passage that is not qal. Look up its root and read the qal block of the lexicon first, then the block for the stem your tool gave. Write two sentences in your notebook. The first begins: In the qal this root means. The second begins: In my passage it is a, followed by the stem's name, and it means. Keep those sentences for the next lesson, which will teach you how to say what the stem has done.