Impersonal and Passive Strategies in Formal Prose

Every language needs a way to say that something happened without saying who did it. English mostly reaches for the passive — the exam was cancelled — and keeps a vague they in reserve. Hebrew's first choice is the opposite one, and formal prose then layers three more strategies on top of it. This page is about choosing among them; the third-person plural is developed on the impersonal plural, and picking between nif'al, pu'al and huf'al is on choosing a passive.

The default: a bare third-person plural

The main strategy has a name in Hebrew grammar — נושא סתמי, an impersonal subject — and it has no marker at all. You simply put the verb in the third-person plural with no subject, and the plural itself carries the meaning "somebody, no one in particular". German spends a whole word on this (man), French another (on); Hebrew spends nothing.

Notice what this is not: it is not a plural of politeness, and it makes no claim that more than one person was involved. גנבו לי את האופניים is entirely compatible with one thief. The plural is a grammatical placeholder, exactly like the on of on m'a volé le vélo.

The passive binyanim

Formal Hebrew, and news Hebrew above all, reaches instead for a passive verb. The three passive binyanim are not interchangeable: each is the passive of a particular active partner.

Two of these binyanim are defective on purpose: pu'al and huf'al have no infinitive and no imperative at all. There is no such word as ❌ לפורסם. When you need an infinitive, you need the active verb — לפרסם.

ניתן, יש ל־, and the notice style with נא

Alongside the passives sit three impersonal frames that take an infinitive.

ניתן + infinitive means it is possible to. Where it turns up tells you its register better than any label: forms, product manuals, municipal websites, academic abstracts. In speech the same content is אפשר.

יש ל־ + infinitive with no person attached is the impersonal one must. Attach a person and the sentence stops being impersonal — יש לי להגיש, I have one to hand in — though that shape belongs to elevated writing too, where ordinary speech says אני צריך להגיש. Either way, the impersonal reading depends on the ל־ standing bare.

נא is a politeness particle. The dictionary documents it attached to an imperative — נָא, "a word of politeness expressing a request, an entreaty, or a softening of an address", with imperative examples throughout (Milog):

Israeli notices, though, run נא in front of a bare infinitive — נא לא לעשן, נא לשמור על הניקיון, נא לשמור על השקט. That is a separate written convention rather than the dictionary's נא, and it is worth learning as a fixed sign formula: it addresses nobody in particular, which is exactly why a public notice wants it.

Naming the agent: על ידי

If you do want to name who did it, Modern Hebrew's default is על ידי. The Academy's own entry on it is careful, and worth quoting rather than paraphrasing. In classical Hebrew על ידי marks an instrument, a means or an intermediary; in Modern Hebrew it took on the sense of English by and came to mark the agent of a passive. The Academy states plainly that it "has not addressed the question of whether this usage is correct", while many language editors have. Those editors — "המקפידים ללכת אחר לשון המקורות", the ones careful to follow the classical sources — generally avoid על ידי for the agent and prefer an active clause, and they recommend keeping the passive mainly for cases where the writer does not want to name the agent at all (Wayback snapshot of the Academy's על ידי וחלופותיו, 9 September 2025).

The same entry lists the alternatives: ב־ (ההחלטה אושרה באקדמיה), מ־ for a cause, מטעם for a sponsor, מפי for something said, and בידי — which some recommend restricting to cases where hands are literally involved.

The news formulas, and the כי that marks them

Three frames carry an enormous amount of Israeli journalism: נמסר כי (it was reported that), נודע כי (it emerged that), הוחלט כי (it was decided that). Each of the three returns a four-figure count in he.wikipedia (regex insource:, 17 August 2026 — above about a thousand, such a figure is a floor rather than an exact count).

The כי is doing register work of its own. Both כי and ש־ introduce the same complement clause, and swapping in ש־ changes nothing about the grammar — נמסר שהפגישה תתקיים is perfectly good Hebrew. What changes is the altitude: כי belongs to writing and to broadcast copy, ש־ to everything else. This is a stylistic split, not a right-and-wrong one, and no page here will mark either as an error. (One methodological note, stated once: ש־ cliticises onto the next word, so a corpus probe for "verb + ש" also catches every noun beginning with ש — לפני שנה, לאחר שעה. No ratio of כי against ש־ can be measured that way, and this page prints none.)

Five conversions

Common Mistakes

1. Supplying a pronoun for the impersonal plural. English they cancelled it has a pronoun, so the hand puts one in — and the Hebrew immediately means specific people.

2. Building an infinitive out of pu'al or huf'al. The passive binyanim of pi'el and hif'il have no infinitive and no imperative, so there is nothing to form.

3. Making ניתן agree with the object. ניתן looks like a participle and invites agreement, but in ניתן + infinitive there is no subject for it to agree with, so it stays in the unmarked masculine singular.

4. Reaching for the English passive when Hebrew wants the plural. המכונית שלי נגנבה על ידי מישהו is a well-formed Hebrew sentence and an English one in disguise. What an Israeli says is גנבו לי את המכונית — and note that the ל־ then carries the injured party, which the passive cannot do.

Key Takeaways

• The default impersonal is a bare third-person plural: ביטלו את המבחן, גנבו לי את האופניים, אומרים ש־. It carries no claim that more than one person was involved, and it works in every register.
• The passive binyanim pair with fixed active partners — nif'al with pa'al (נמסר), pu'al with pi'el (פורסם), huf'al with hif'il (הוחלט) — and pu'al and huf'al have no infinitive, so there is no ❌ לפורסם.
• ניתן + infinitive and bare יש ל־ + infinitive are the impersonal frames of forms and signage; the spoken equivalents are אפשר and צריך.
• נא is documented with an imperative (שמור נא), while the notice style נא לא לעשן puts it in front of an infinitive — a separate written convention, and the one you will actually see on a wall.
• For the agent, Modern Hebrew uses על ידי; the Academy has not ruled on it, and the editors who avoid it prefer an active clause, keeping the passive for when the agent is deliberately left out.
• כי rather than ש־ after נמסר, נודע and הוחלט is a register marker, never an error.