Does Hebrew Have Verbs?

# Does Hebrew Have Verbs?
By Benquo
Published: 2026-03-20
Spinoza's *[Compendium of Hebrew Grammar](https://archive.org/details/ned-kbn-all-00004303-001)* (1677, posthumous, unfinished) claims that all Hebrew words, except a few particles, are nouns. The standard scholarly reaction is that this is either a metaphysical imposition (projecting his monistic ontology onto grammar) or a terminological trick (defining "noun" so broadly it's vacuous). Both wrongly project Greek and Latin grammatical categories as the neutral baseline.

# Spinoza's Claim: Hebrew's All Nouns

From Chapter 5 of the *Compendium* ([Bloom translation, 1962](https://books.google.com/books/about/Hebrew_grammar.html?id=ai1iAAAAMAAJ)):

> "By a noun I understand a word by which we signify or indicate something that is understood. However, among things that are understood there can be either things and attributes of things, modes and relationships, or actions, and modes and relationships of actions."

And:

> "For all Hebrew words, except for a few interjections and conjunctions and one or two particles, have the force and properties of nouns. Because the grammarians did not understand this they considered many words to be irregular which according to the usage of language are most regular."

The word "noun" here is *nomen*. It means "name." Spinoza is saying: almost every Hebrew word is a name for something understood. This includes names for actions, names for relationships, names for attributes. His taxonomy of intelligible content explicitly includes actions and modes of actions alongside things and attributes.

# The Vacuousness Objection

The obvious objection is: if "noun" covers actions as well as things, then the claim that "all words are nouns" is trivially true and does no work. Any content word names something intelligible; so what?

But this objection assumes that a useful grammar *must* draw a hard categorical line between nouns and verbs, and that Spinoza's refusal to draw it is therefore vacuous. That assumption is embedded in the Greek grammatical tradition; it is not a fact about Hebrew.

# Semitic Roots

In Hebrew (and Arabic, Akkadian, and other [Semitic languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root)), words are generated from consonantal roots—typically trilateral—by applying vowel patterns and affixes. The root כ-ת-ב generates *katav* (he wrote), *kotev* (one who writes), *ktav* (writing/script), *mikhtav* (letter), *katvan* (scribbler). The morphological operation is the same in every case: take the root, apply a pattern that describes the relation of the concept to the thing you are describing. For example, *mikhtav* is something that is made-written, a letter, much like the Arabic *mameluke* is someone who is made-owned, a slave. Whether the output functions as what a Greek grammarian would call a "noun" or a "verb" depends on which pattern you applied, not on some fundamentally different generative process.

This is not how Greek or Latin works. I

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