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I am looking at Amos 3:6 and I expected a permissive rather than causative verb but I found a perfect qal. Does this qal actually mean cause here?

Amo 3:6 Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?

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2 Answers

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According to Waltke/O'Connor, "the Qal...is simple semantically in that notions of causation are absent." (p. 362). Qal is kinda like the Greek aorist of Hebrew (btw the LXX translates it with an aorist). There is no idea causation being communicated in the stem. This is not to say there is none being implied by the broader context. However, the parsing only gets you so far in this case. You will need to do three things. (1) Do a lexical study of רָעָה ("evil") to make sure you know the full semantic range and usage here, (2) Look for similar constructions, and (3) consider theological implications.

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thank you i now understand that Qal's do not imply causation and can be permissive – caseyr547 Mar 19 at 2:37
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Word studies simply aren't enough. Amos, as with all the prophets, is bringing a Covenant lawsuit against those whose fathers swore to keep Covenant with God. God would quite justly bring disaster upon them because He told them exactly what He would do to them (see Lev 26 and Deut 28 for Covenant blessings and curses).

What is more, the text even tells us that the Lord tells the prophets exactly what He was going to do. They are his "repo men," knocking on the door with words from the landlord.

In the New Testament, it is the apostles who take on this role. Acts and Hebrews and Revelation make perfect sense in light of this Covenantal understanding. The apostles were blowing the trumpets around the city, and the last trumpet would bring upon it all the innocent blood of the prophets beginning with Abel.

So, direct causation, yes. Via Assyria, Babylon and Rome, but direct nonetheless, as per the contract.

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Thank you for your opinion but the reasoning in your hermeneutics is based on no scriptural support from the voice perspective. There are no curses in the new testiment proclaimed by apostles. The idea of apostles as repo men is absolutely absurd. Jesus called such things of the wrong spirit. Luk 9:54 Here it is just a qal a causative voice could have been selected. Indeed the permissive voice is even used to describe the cureses and blessings in Deut 28:15. The causative voices are used to describe the blessing and permissive to describe the curses in Genesis 12:3. – caseyr547 Mar 21 at 11:11
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This may be an interesting opinion but how does it answer the grammar question that was asked? – Monica Cellio Mar 21 at 14:57
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Word studies may not be enough to draw doctrinal conclusions, but that is not our primary objective here. This question is specifically a question about a word -- about grammar. It may or may not be relevant to drag in a doctrinal framework to deal with this issue, but it is not appropriate to not deal with the issue at all and fast-forward straight to the doctrinal framework. That isn't the sort of hermeneutics we want to see practiced here. This isn't a "holistic" approach, it's a very partial approach because it doesn't specifically answer the question asked. Does that make any sense? – Caleb♦ Apr 4 at 10:14
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I'm sympathetic to your argument here Mike, and I certainly approve of zooming out and looking at the context, but in that case I think that on this site the onus does need to be on you to explain your reading of the context and that is more difficult and time-consuming than just stating it. – Jack Douglas♦ Apr 12 at 8:16
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I would prefer that as an outcome here, but the other option is the direction it's taking so far: downvotes that express that this isn't the kind of answer we want to see and even delete votes that will eventually remove this as a sort of answer that doesn't belong here. Your conclusions aren't the problem -- using convenant context to help interpret the passage is not a problem as long as you start up from the text and show how that context is relevant to interpreting the words raised in the question. – Caleb♦ Apr 12 at 13:32
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