Genesis 2:24 - is the joining / clinging between man and wife in the active or passive tense?

Question

Some translations of Genesis 2:24 (eg NKJV) say:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

While others (eg KJV) use the active tense:

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Which is the better translation? I ask because in Mark 10:9, Jesus seems to be quoting v24 to point out the passiveness of the joining, because it is God who joins husband and wife together:

Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.

Which translation of the verb did the LXX use?

Answer 1

The verb in Hebrew is דָבַק with the preposition בְּ; in Greek, it is προσκολληθήσεται πρὸς. Thus, in Hebrew it is a Qal verb, and in Greek it is a passive voice.

However, this does not really mean anything. For example, in Russian, to spell is a reflexive (i.e., literally "the word spells itself as W-O-R-D"), but this does not mean that Russian speakers imagine spelling differently than English speakers. Whether a verb is active, middle or passive morphologically does not have a direct bearing on the question of meaning.

The verb is in my opinion best understood as a stative, which can easily be expressed with both an active and a passive voice depending on the language. In the Hebrew text there is no basis for Mark's interpretation, because we would then expect a passive Hiphil, "man is caused to cleave to ... [by God]", or an active Hiphil with God as the subject, "God causes man to cleave to ...".