1. The fourth stem is called the pu‘al stem. It is a derivative of pi‘el and has only one meaning: it is always passive, effected by another—namely, its parent, the pi‘el stem, from which it receives its form. For this reason it too is geminated like its parent. For example, if you say of the parent sipper, kipper, you say of the derivative suppar, kuppar. And note that the agent—the one who tells or the one who makes atonement—is not mentioned; that is, it is not specified whether the doer is male or female, singular or plural. Therefore it is called a stem in which the name of the agent is not mentioned.

2. And likewise with the hof‘al stem, which is derived from the hif‘il stem, for the law governing both of them is the same: they always receive their action from another. For this reason, neither of them has an imperative, for how could one command another in a passive form derived from transitive verbs, as I have written in this treatise in the eighth principle? And all the more so, they have no active form. Even the participle does not occur in pu‘al except in a few places where it functions as an adjective, such as “ve-ha-seneh einennu ukkal” (Exodus 3:2), “la-na‘ar ha-yullad” (Judges 13:8). These are adjectival forms, as is evident from the qamats vowel; and one cannot say that they are past tense forms with a qamats because of the end of the verse, for if that were so it would have had to say “ve-ha-seneh lo ukkal,” since the word ein is used only with nouns and not with verbs. Likewise, the he of the definite article in the word ha-yullad proves that it is not a past tense verb, for the definite article is never used with verbs. Therefore we must say that these are adjectival participles. In the hof‘al stem, however, neither participle nor adjective is ever found. The infinitive too is found in neither of them except in a few places, and never with the letters b-k-l-m, as will be explained to you in the second treatise, principle two. Thus there remain in them only the past and the future.

3. And some grammarians say that even in the future tense one should not use the pu‘al and hof‘al stems except in two persons, since the first-person forms are lacking from them. They say this because only one such form is found in Scripture, namely “mi-beten la-qever uval” (Job 10:19), which is a future form from the hof‘al stem of a verb with a quiescent initial yod. But it seems to me that for this reason one should not refrain from using them. For how many words do we use by way of reasoning even though they are not found explicitly in Scripture—and all the more so in cases like these, where at least one instance is found in Scripture. Why, then, should we not use them?