To give: to hand something over from your possession into another's. The basic transfer of a thing from one hand to the next, whether bread, money, or charge. There is nothing ceremonial in the root itself; it is the verb of the marketplace and the table as much as of heaven.
And yet it is everywhere: 223 occurrences, one of the great workhorse verbs of the corpus. Bread is given, rewards are given, the secrets of the reign are given, authority is given. Very often the giver goes unnamed: "it is given," "it will be given," the quiet passive this speech uses when the hand doing the giving is God's. To learn this root is to start hearing how much of the corpus is about things changing hands.
| Form | Pattern | Transliteration | Script | Standard | Qala rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Imperative (sg) | Peal | hab | הב ܗܰܒ݂ | give! | Give us the bread (Mt 6:11) |
| Imperative (pl) | Peal | habw | הבו ܗܰܒ݂ܘ | give! (you all) | You give them something to eat (Mt 14:16) |
| Passive participle | Peal | yihib | יהיב ܝܺܗܺܝܒ݂ | is given | to you it is given (Mt 13:11) |
| Passive imperfect | Ethpeel | netiheb | נתיהב ܢܶܬ݂ܺܝܗܶܒ݂ | it will be given | more will be given (Mt 13:12) |
| Stem | Form | Sense | In this corpus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peal | yhab / hab | to give: perfect, imperative, participles | throughout: Mt 6:11; 13:11; 14:16 |
| Ethpeel | ʾetiheb | to be given | Mt 7:7; 13:12 |
| Pael | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Ethpaal | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Aphel | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Ettaphal | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Shaphel | — | — | not attested in this corpus |
Before you eat today, pause with the food in front of you and say hab lan (give us) slowly. Feel what the words admit: that the bread reached you through hands that were not yours: soil, labor, trade, kitchen. Then, once today, be the unnamed hand: give one thing (time, food, attention) without signing it. The corpus keeps the giver anonymous in its deepest sentences; try that grammar on your own giving.
Hebrew has the cognate yāhab, though it survives there almost only in the imperative (hābâ, "come now, give") while everyday Hebrew says nātan instead. In Aramaic the relationship runs the other way: Y-H-B is the living verb, borrowing only its future from N-T-L. Within the 75, this root answers yesterday's Q-B-L: receive (one exchange, seen from the two ends) and stands behind Sh-ʾ-L: ask: "Ask, and it will be given to you" (Mt 7:7) joins the two roots in a single breath.
Take two or three minutes and teach a friend the two imperatives: hab: give (to one person's ear), and habw: you all give. Say the bread-line of the prayer in Matthew 6:11, then tell the story of Matthew 14:16, where the students who prayed "give us" are told "you give them." Finish by explaining why "it will be given" so often has no giver named.