Ecclesiastes 3: A Time for Everything

Learners guess Hebrew infinitive vowels wrong because they assume there is one prefix, לְ־, and that it never changes. It changes constantly. Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 is the passage that proves it: in seven verses it produces five different vowels under that ל, all of them still live in modern Hebrew, and it runs almost every weak-root class in the language past you while doing it. There is no better naturally occurring drill for the Hebrew infinitive anywhere.

Infinitive syntax — what an infinitive can complement, when it must be used — belongs to the infinitive. This page is about the shapes.

How the text is set

The Hebrew below is the consonantal Masoretic text, checked verse by verse on Sefaria against Miqra according to the Masorah, with a pointed reading line carrying the Masoretic vowels and no cantillation marks. That is classical ktiv haser and not the bare modern ktiv male used elsewhere in this guide — לרחק here, לרחוק today. ׃ is the sof pasuq; ־ is a maqaf.

The frame verse, and a distinction the consonants cannot show

Read the target line: לכל appears twice, spelled identically. Read the pointed line and they are two different words.

The article has vanished into the ל and left a patach behind — the same swallowing that gives modern בָּעִיר and לַבַּיִת. And in the second phrase the maqaf has shortened כֹּל to כׇל־, which is precisely why modern Hebrew writes כל bound to a noun (כל יום) but הכול standing free. Both facts are unpointed-invisible; both are on the maqaf page.

Two words to keep. עֵת is feminine (Klein glosses it f.n., "time, season, appointed time"), and it is alive: כתב עת is a journal, לעת עתה is "for the time being". חֵפֶץ meant "matter, affair" here and today means "object, article" — the word in חפצים אבודים, lost property.

The arithmetic, because the shape of the passage is the argument

Verses 2 to 8 contain 28 עֵת phrases in 14 antithetical pairs, four to a verse. They are not all built the same way, and the exceptions are the interesting part:

Of the 23 ל-infinitives, 18 are pa'al, three are pi'el (לְבַקֵּשׁ, לְאַבֵּד, לְדַבֵּר) and two are hif'il (לְהַשְׁלִיךְ, which occurs in verse 5 and again in verse 6). The three bare infinitives are pa'al as well. So the closing pair of the whole poem — "a time of war and a time of peace" — is the one pair with no verb form in it at all, and the poem ends on two nouns.

The five vowels under ל

Line those infinitives up by the vowel under the ל and the system falls out. The vowel on the ל mirrors the first vowel of the bare infinitive stem.

A tour of the weak roots, in the order the poem supplies them

Every infinitive above that is not built on a plain strong root is built on a gizra, and this one passage happens to run through most of them. Working out which class a form belongs to is the whole skill of identifying the gizra.

Note לָטַעַת in particular: it is a pe-nun root whose first letter is gone entirely, exactly like modern לָתֵת from נ־ת־ן and לָגֶשֶׁת from נ־ג־שׁ, and its third radical is also a guttural, which is what gives it patach where לָגֶשֶׁת has segol. Two weaknesses in one four-letter word.

Words that changed, and one letter that decides a meaning

לִשְׂחוֹק is written with שׂ, sin. The root is שׂ־ח־ק, "to laugh, to play" — Jastrow glosses שָׂחַק as "to be bright; to laugh, jest, play" — and it survives today as the pi'el לְשַׂחֵק, to play a game or a role. With a שׁ instead, שָׁחַק is a different verb entirely, "to rub, grind", and modern לִשְׁחוֹק means to erode. One dot separates them. Modern Hebrew laughs with a third root, צ־ח־ק, in לִצְחוֹק.

Three of these infinitives did not survive as everyday verbs, and the honest register labels matter:

• לַחֲשׁוֹת "to be silent" (ח־שׁ־ה, Klein: "to be silent, be inactive") is (Biblical); today you say לִשְׁתּוֹק.
• לִרְחֹק "to be far" is the pa'al of ר־ח־ק, which BDB gives as "to be or become far". Modern Hebrew almost always reaches for the hitpa'el לְהִתְרַחֵק instead, and the pa'al reads (literary).
• לַחֲבוֹק is (literary); the everyday word for hugging is the pi'el לְחַבֵּק — which is exactly what the same verse then supplies in מֵחַבֵּק, מן plus a pi'el participle, "from embracing".

נָטוּעַ is the other participle here: the pa'al passive participle of נ־ט־ע, "planted", built on the same קָטוּל pattern as כָּתוּב and סָגוּר. And כְּנוֹס is a bare pa'al infinitive meaning "to gather"; the root is still central in modern Hebrew — כנס is a conference, לְהִתְכַּנֵּס is to convene — but for gathering up stones you would now say לֶאֱסוֹף.

Common Mistakes

1. Hunting for the verb that was left out of עֵת לָמוּת. English needs "there is a time to die", and so, as it happens, does modern Hebrew — an Israeli says יש זמן. Nothing has been elided from the verse: עֵת plus an infinitive is already a complete clause, and the classical language simply does not require a verb of existence where the modern one does.

2. Reading לָלֶדֶת as a passive. English translations from the King James onward pair "a time to be born" with "a time to die", and that pairing is a translator's choice, not something the Hebrew form says.

3. Back-deriving an irregular infinitive to the wrong root. Strip לָ־ from לָמוּת and you are left with מות, which looks like a two-letter root or invites a doubled one; the same reflex turns לָלֶדֶת into a root beginning with ל.

4. Assuming every עֵת takes a ל. Three do not, and a reader expecting one will misparse סְפוֹד and רְקוֹד as nouns. The modern verb, incidentally, takes the ordinary chirik.

5. Fixing the ל at לְ־. The plain shva is the pi'el and hif'il vowel. Put it on a pa'al stem and you produce a reading no Israeli uses.

Key Takeaways

• Verses 2–8 hold 28 עֵת phrases in 14 pairs: 23 with ל plus an infinitive, 3 bare infinitive constructs (סְפוֹד, רְקוֹד, כְּנוֹס), and 2 plain nouns in the closing pair.
• The vowel under ל is not fixed. This passage alone supplies לִ־, לָ־, לַ־, לֶ־ and לְ־, and each one is predicted by the first vowel of the stem that follows. The same five are live in modern Hebrew.
• Of the 23 ל-infinitives, 18 are pa'al, 3 pi'el, 2 hif'il — and every irregular shape traces to a weak-root class: פ״י, ע״ו, פ״נ, ל״ה, ל״א, ל״ג, פ״א.
• עֵת plus an infinitive is a complete clause. Hebrew supplies no verb of existence; the English is has no counterpart to look for.
• לִשְׂחוֹק with sin is "to laugh" (root שׂ־ח־ק, modern לְשַׂחֵק "to play"); לִשְׁחוֹק with shin is "to erode". Read the dot.
• לַחֲשׁוֹת is Biblical, לִרְחֹק and לַחֲבוֹק literary. Recognizing them is the goal; the modern equivalents are לִשְׁתּוֹק, לְהִתְרַחֵק and לְחַבֵּק.