In the new, cleverly named Festschrift for Ed Greenstein (Ve-‘Ed ya’aleh), Randall Garr has an article called “A Note on the Pluractional Piel.”
What is the “pluractional Piel,” you ask? Piel, of course, is one of the binyanim of Hebrew, the verbal patterns that play a role in changing the meaning of a 3-letter Semitic root – call it a way to create “variations on a theme.” At some point I may write a Beginners’ Guide™ entry on the binyanim; for now, to learn more, see Lecture 15 of my Biblical Hebrew course for the Teaching Company.
What does Piel do to a root? One common answer is that it intensifies the root in some indefinable way: turning break into shatter or learn into teach. But another answer that some scholars give is that it is pluractional.
This turns out to be a term invented by Paul Newman – not the actor, but a professor of linguistics from Indiana University. He intended it to describe “verb forms whose function was to indicate plurality of action or event.”
Garr cites an idea of the great Moshe Greenberg that one “pluractional” aspect of the Piel might be that it is enacted over a wide area in space. One of Garr’s examples of this is in Song 2:8, where the woman’s beloved “comes leaping [מְדַלֵּג] over mountains and jumping [מְקַפֵּץ] over hills.”
These are certainly Piels. Now, are they “pluractional”? מְקַפֵּץ is the only Piel from that root (and if the Hebrew & Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament is correct it is a hapax legomenon, merely a homonym of the other קפץ, which never occurs in Piel). As for מְדַלֵּג, there are 4 Piels and 1 Qal. It is hard to see how “leaping a wall” (in 2 Sam 22:30 // Ps 18:30) could be carried out “over a wide area.”
But I’m not really here to argue about the pluractional Piel. (In fact, that phrase is kind of fun to say.) What I want to talk about is the sound of these two verbs – because this is poetry. Linguistic discussions never seem to ask whether there might be a literary reason for a particular grammatical choice, and in this case there most certainly is.
In this scene, the beloved is not literally “leaping over mountains and jumping over hills,” like some biblical Superman, able to “leap tall buildings in a single bound.” Rather, like a gazelle (v. 9), he is galloping toward her. It is no coincidence that “galloping” shares a rhythm with these two Piel participles, and two of the consonantal sounds of מְדַלֵּג as well. The poet has deliberately chosen these words for the double sound effect they provide, of the beloved advancing toward her at speed, like a gazelle bounding over the hills.
The same effect occurs in v. 9b, the poetic line that corresponds to this one, when he has arrived outside her house and is “peeping” [מַשְׁגִּ֙יחַ֙] and “peeking” [מֵצִ֖יץ] through the lattice, this time with Hiphil participles whose quick, darting ee sounds are like those of the English words I’ve chosen to translate them with here.
I have nothing against the pluractional Piel – but I do insist that serious discussions of Biblical Hebrew grammar and morphology can’t ignore the higher-level reasons why an author might have chosen to use a particular word in a particular form.
And yes, this is one of the poems I hope one day to write or teach about in “How to Read and Understand Biblical Poetry.”
The Bible Guy 