To owe. Ḥ-Y-B is the feeling of standing under something: a sum entered against your name in someone else's ledger, a weight you carry into every room where your creditor might be. The ḥayyaba is the debtor (the one bound to repay), and the root's reach runs past money into the courtroom, where "liable" is the verdict itself. To be ḥayyab is to be the one the ledger points at.
Yeshua's world ran on this word. Tenant farmers owed landlords, whole villages owed tax-farmers, and everyone knew the sick arithmetic of a debt that can never be paid down. So when he teaches his students to pray, he puts the ledger at the center, and then does something no creditor in the ancient world would do: he makes your own release exactly as wide as the release you extend.
| Form | Pattern | Translit | Script | Standard | Qala rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ḥayyab | adjective, qaṭṭāl pattern | ḥayyāb | דחיב ܕ݁ܚܰܝܳܒ݂ (corpus form d-ḥayyab) | owing, liable | owed, in debt (Matthew 18:24) |
| ḥayyaba | noun | ḥayyābā | חיבא ܚܝܒܐ | debtor | one in debt: 13 occurrences in the corpus |
| ḥayyeb | verb (Pael) | ḥayyeb | ונחיבונה ܘܢܚܝܒܘܢܗ (corpus form wa-nḥaybunah) | to condemn | condemn: literally "declare liable" (Matthew 12:41) |
| Stem | Form | Sense | Witness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peal | ḥab | to owe, be liable | corpus face is the participle-adjective ḥayyab "owing" (Matthew 18:24; Luke 7:41) |
| Pael | ḥayyeb | to declare liable, condemn | corpus: wa-nḥaybunah "and condemn it" (Matthew 12:41) |
| Ethpaal | etḥayyab | to be found liable | standard grammar scaffold; not found in this corpus |
| Ethpeel · Aphel · Ettaphal · Shaphel | — | — | not attested for this root |
Sit with your own ledger for a few minutes: the real one you keep without admitting it. Who owes you? An apology, money, gratitude, years? Feel how carrying their debt keeps them chained to your accounting, and notice how much of you is employed as the bookkeeper. Then try the prayer's move, in this root's plain terms: choose one line in the ledger and mark it released, not excused, not forgotten, released. The teaching's claim is precise and testable: the hand that lets go of that line is the same hand that can finally receive its own release.
This root and Ḥ-W-B, debt (Day 7) are two branches of one ancient stem; the lexicons file them together: ḥawba is the debt, ḥayyaba the person under it. What undoes them both is Sh-B-Q, release (Day 6), the prayer's verb. In the courtroom of D-Y-N (Day 63), this root is one of the two possible verdicts: ḥayyab, liable, and its exact opposite is tomorrow's root, Z-K-Y, acquitted (Day 68). That verdict-pair, ḥayyab against zakkay, stayed alive for centuries in the rabbinic courts, and Hebrew still uses ḥayyav to mean "obligated, must."
Explain to a friend why the Lord's Prayer talks about debt at all. Teach them the pair: ḥawba, the debt, and ḥayyaba, the one who owes it, and how Matthew 6:12 uses both in a single breath. Then tell the ten-thousand-talent story with modern numbers: a debt the size of a national budget, forgiven before lunch, and the forgiven man choking a coworker over a hundred dollars by mid-afternoon. Ask them what the parable is really measuring.