Naming the Agent: על ידי, בידי, מ־

English lets by cover a striking range of relations: a novel by an author, a cut made by a knife, damage caused by an explosion, a response issued by a ministry. Hebrew does not hand all four jobs to one preposition. Before translating by, decide whether the following noun is an agent, instrument, cause or source.

That decision is also a register decision. A passive with an expressed agent is grammatically ordinary but stylistically concentrated in formal, journalistic, legal and academic prose. Conversation more often makes the agent the active subject.

The four-way distinction

Ask whether the noun denotes the participant that carried out or controlled the action. Volition is prototypical, not required: someone who causes an outcome accidentally can still be the passive agent rather than an instrument or impersonal force.

Here is the distinction in four complete sentences. English can translate every bold phrase with by or from; Hebrew makes the semantic roles visible.

על ידי: the modern default for an expressed agent

In a modern passive clause, על ידי + noun phrase is the clearest general marker of the doer. Its literal historical components are “on” and the construct plural “hands of,” but synchronically the whole expression functions as a compound preposition.

The Academy's article על ידי וחלופותיו describes the history carefully. Classical על ידי marked means, instrument or intermediary; Modern Hebrew extended it under European influence to the passive agent. The Academy says it has not issued a ruling on whether that modern use is “correct,” while source-oriented editors often prefer an active clause. That is a prescriptive history, not a reason to pretend the construction is absent: contemporary linguistic descriptions treat על ידי as the established agent marker. Yael Reshef's corpus-based history likewise identifies it as the selected modern marker, with בידי less frequent. For the larger voice choice, see choosing a passive strategy.

Write the expression as two words: על ידי. The standard abbreviation is ע״י, with Hebrew gershayim. It is suitable for notes, forms and compressed administrative prose; spelling it עלידי as one word is not standard orthography.

Inflecting על ידי

With a pronoun, the suffix attaches to יד, not to על. This produces forms that look identical to the literal expression “beside him/them”; context and the passive predicate disambiguate them.

בידי: shorter, weightier, and visibly about hands

בידי is also a real passive-agent marker. It is written as one word and often gives a sentence a more elevated, historical or institutional cadence than על ידי. It is especially natural with conquest, custody, control and deliberate human workmanship—domains where “in the hands of” remains semantically close.

There is real prescriptive disagreement here. The Academy reports that some editors recommend reserving בידי for literal or strongly hand-associated action. Actual formal Hebrew extends it to agents such as armies, committees and institutions. Label it formal/elevated, not archaic and not ungrammatical.

Instrument, cause and source are not agents

An instrument takes ב־. This is the same instrumental prefix used in כתב בעט “wrote with a pen” and נסע באוטובוס “went by bus,” developed on ב־ of price, instrument and means.

A nonintentional cause normally takes מ־, often in exactly the middle or passive-looking clauses where English says by.

מצד presents a response, signal, objection, pressure or initiative as coming “from the side of” an institution or participant. It marks the source or stance, not the syntactic agent of the passive verb.

Why conversation usually turns the sentence around

A named agent is already important information. Once you decide to mention it, ordinary speech normally promotes it straight to the active subject. When nobody is named, conversation also has the subjectless third-person plural.

The passive version is not wrong. It selects the problem as the discourse topic, then adds the department afterward. That packaging is useful in reports whose paragraphs track cases, applications, experiments or proposals rather than people. The agent phrase is therefore a register marker before it is a grammatical necessity.

Common Mistakes

1. Translating every English “by” with ב־. A person who writes a book is an agent, not a pen-like instrument.

2. Treating a cause as an agent. Economic reasons do not carry out or control an action.

3. Writing the compound preposition as one word. Its modern agent meaning does not change its spelling.

4. Bolting a passive agent onto the subjectless active plural. The two voice strategies cannot occupy the same clause.

Key Takeaways

• על ידי is the established general marker of an expressed passive agent in Modern Hebrew; write it as two words. ע״י is its administrative abbreviation.
• Its suffixed forms are על ידי, על ידו, על ידם and so on: the suffix attaches to יד.
• בידי also names an agent, with a more formal, elevated and often hand-associated tone; it is one word.
• Instrument ב־, cause מ־ and institutional source מצד are not interchangeable agent markers.
• Passive plus agent is at home in reports, legal prose and academic writing. Ordinary conversation usually chooses the active: מחלקת התמיכה פתרה את הבעיה.