Lesson 6 | Commands
[1] Imperatives
It is helpful to think about all the command forms—imperatives, jussives, and cohortatives—as slight modifications on the imperfect. Let’s begin with the imperative.
The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” about once in a minute. Alice began to feel very uneasy....
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, CHAPTER VIII, “The Queen’s Croquet-Ground.”
“Off with her head!”
The Queen of Hearts’ constant refrain is an imperative—the most basic type of command—and describes exactly how to turn a Hebrew imperfect into an imperative: chop off its head! (That is, remove the prefix.) And since imperatives are 2nd person commands, they have only four possible forms for any given stem—2ms, 2fs, 2mp, and 2fp.
2ms imperative & imperfect
| qal | לֵךְ | תֵּלֵךְ | go / you will go |
| piel | דַּבֵּר | תְּדַבֵּר | speak / you will speak |
| hiphil | הַגֶּד | תַּגִּיד | tell / you will tell |
| niphal | הִנָּבֵא | תִּנָּבֵא | prophesy / you will prophesy |
| hithpael | הִתְיַצֵּב | תִּתְיַצֵּב | stand / you will stand |
Notice that in the qal and piel the “head” of the form, the prefixed ת, has been simply chopped off. But in the hiphil, niphal, and hithpael, the “head” has been replaced by a ה. In addition, note that the hiphil form loses its chirik yod. (The pual and hophal forms are not present here because together they only appear twice in the entire Hebrew Bible.)
Let’s look at Genesis 14:21, where two weak verbs occur in the imperative. Notice that since the first consonant would have dropped off when the prefix of the imperfect was added, when the prefix is chopped off, the first consonant is not re-added.