Isaiah lived in the eighth century before Christ. Yet in one of his best-known prophecies he says:
For a child has been born for us, a son has been given to us, and the right to rule rests on his shoulders. He has been named Planner of Wonders, God the Mighty Warrior, Father for All Time, Ruler of Peace.
“Has been born.” “Has been given.” The child is spoken of as already here. Most English Bibles number this verse 9:6; Open Word Bible follows the Hebrew numbering, where it is 9:5. Christians have long read it as a promise of Christ, seven centuries later. So why does the prophet use a past tense?
The short answer is that Biblical Hebrew does not have tenses in the English sense. Its verbs say something about how an action is viewed more than when it happens, and the translator has to decide the time from the context. This article explains how that works, and what Open Word Bible does with it.
Two forms, not three tenses
English verbs carry time on their surface. “I walked”, “I walk”, “I will walk”: the form tells you past, present or future.
Biblical Hebrew has two main finite verb forms. Grammarians give them several names. One is formed mainly with endings added to the verb, and is often called the perfect, or by its pattern-name qatal, from the verb “to kill” that older grammars used as a model. The other is formed mainly with prefixes, and is called the imperfect, or yiqtol.
It is tempting to think of these as a past tense and a future tense, and very often that is how they come out in English. The qatal form usually describes something that has happened, and the yiqtol form often describes something that will happen. But each is used in ways that break that rule, and they break it often enough that the rule cannot be the whole story.
Most grammarians describe the difference as one of aspect. The perfect presents an action as a whole, complete, seen from outside. The imperfect presents it as ongoing, unfinished, repeated, or not yet real. Time comes in only indirectly: a complete action is usually past, and an incomplete one is often present or future.
Scholars still debate exactly how the system works. Some stress aspect, some argue that tense plays a larger part than older grammars allowed, and some point to mood, the difference between what is real and what is only possible or wished. The language also changed over the centuries in which the Hebrew Bible was written. For a reader, what matters is this: a Hebrew verb form does not settle the time by itself, and every translation into English has to choose.
The story form
There is a third form that shows up on almost every page of Hebrew narrative. It begins with the word “and” fused to a form that looks like the imperfect. Grammarians call it the wayyiqtol, or the narrative form. It carries a story forward, one event after another.
Genesis 1 is built from it. In verse 3:
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
The first verb, “and God said”, is וַיֹּ֥אמֶר (wayyōʾmer). Then God’s command, “let there be light”, uses a form of the verb “to be”, and the report, “and there was light”, uses the narrative form of the same verb, וַֽיְהִי (wayhî). The record for this verse points out that the command and the result are two forms of one verb, so the report repeats the command word for word. God speaks, and what he says happens.
Older grammars called the “and” in this form a waw conversive, on the theory that it converted a future into a past. Most scholars now think it is not a conversion at all but a distinct verb form, descended from an ancient past tense that survived in this one construction. Either way, the result is the same for a reader. Hebrew stories run on long chains of “and he did this, and he said that”, and the past tense in English is right.
The long chain of “and”s is itself a translation question. The King James Version kept nearly all of them. Many modern versions drop most of them, because English does not begin sentence after sentence with “and”. In Open Word Bible, the Literal level keeps “And God said”; Balanced and Readable say “God said” and “Then God said”. The Hebrew “and” often works more like a full stop or a “then” than like the English word.
The perfect that is present
The perfect does not always mean past. Two common uses surprise English readers.
The first is with verbs that describe a state rather than an event: knowing, loving, hating, trusting. In Hebrew the perfect of such a verb usually means the state holds now. When God tells Abraham to take “your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac” (Genesis 22:2), the verb “love” is אָהַ֨בְתָּ֙ (ʾāhaḇtā), a perfect. No one translates it “whom you loved”. Abraham’s love is not over. The perfect presents it as a settled fact.
The second is for what is always true. Psalm 1 opens with a portrait of the blessed person:
How blessed is the one who does not walk by the advice of the wicked, or stand on the path that sinners tread, or sit where mockers gather!
The three verbs (walk, stand, sit) are all in the perfect. The record’s grammar decision says so directly: the verbs are in the Hebrew past form, used for what is always true, so they are rendered in the present. “Who has not walked” would be a strange way to describe a way of life. The psalm is not looking back. It is describing a kind of person.
Sometimes the choice is less clear. In Psalm 3:6 David says he lay down and slept and woke again, because the LORD sustained him. The verbs are perfects. The record reads them as last night, a real night in the middle of danger, and gives the other reading as its alternative: some take them as what he always does. The record adds that either way, sleep in the middle of danger shows his trust. The verb form alone cannot decide between them.
The imperfect that is past
The imperfect, in turn, does not always mean future. It is used for anything not presented as a single complete whole, and that includes habits.
The book of Job begins with a portrait of Job’s piety. After his children’s feasts, Job would get up early and offer burnt offerings for each of them, in case they had sinned:
Whenever a round of feasting was over, Job would send for his children and consecrate them. He would get up early in the morning and offer a burnt offering for each one of them, because Job said to himself, “Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” This is what Job always did.
The record’s grammar decision notes that the verb form describes repeated action, and “all the days” means always. English expresses that with “would”: “Job would send for his children.” The time is past. The form is the one usually called imperfect, because the action is seen as repeated, not as one complete event.
The imperfect can also span present and future together. Psalm 23 begins:
A psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I will never be in need.
The verb “lack” is אֶחְסָֽר (ʾeḥsār), an imperfect. The record says its form covers the present and the future: I have, and will have, all I need. The Literal level says “I will not lack [anything]”, Balanced “I will never be in need”, and Readable “I have everything I need”. The three levels lean in slightly different directions, but they are not choosing different meanings. All three sit inside what the meaning decision says.
Prophets who speak of the future as past
Now back to Isaiah. Alongside these everyday uses, the perfect has one more, which is especially common in prophecy and in prayer. A speaker describes something that has not yet happened as if it were already done, because it is certain. Grammarians call it the prophetic perfect, or the perfect of certainty.
English does something like this too. A coach whose team leads by forty points says, “We’ve won this.” The game is not over, but the result is settled.
In the Hebrew Bible the settled thing is usually God’s own decision. Open Word Bible’s records note this use again and again, in the historical books, the Psalms and the prophets. Some examples:
- Joshua 6:2. Before the walls of Jericho fall, the LORD says, “I have given Jericho into your hand.” The record says the victory is spoken of as already done, because God speaks of what he has decided as already settled.
- Amos 5:2. Amos sings a funeral song over Israel: “Fallen, never to rise again, is Virgin Israel.” The record notes that Israel was still standing and prosperous when Amos spoke. The lament speaks of its fall as already certain, as if the funeral had begun.
- Jeremiah 50:2. Heralds are told to announce “Babylon is taken” while Babylon still rules the world. The record says they proclaim its fall as a fact, because God has decided it.
- Isaiah 9:1. “The people walking in the dark have seen a great light.” The record says the coming light is described as already here, and that Matthew quotes these verses of Jesus beginning his work in Galilee.
The same habit reaches into the New Testament, though Greek verbs work differently. In Romans 8:30 Paul writes that those God justified, “he also glorified”. The record for that verse notes that glory is still to be revealed, and that Paul uses the past tense because, in God’s purpose, it is as certain as the calling and justifying that have already happened.
When the levels choose differently
The prophetic perfect raises a real question for a translator. Should English keep the past tense, and trust the reader to see that the event is still to come? Or should it use the future, which says plainly what the prophet means, and lose the note of certainty?
Open Word Bible answers verse by verse, and the three levels do not always answer alike. Isaiah 5:13 shows the difference clearly. The verb is גָּלָ֥ה (gālâ), a perfect, “has gone into exile”:
Therefore my people have gone into exile for lack of knowledge, and its honored [ones are] men of hunger, and its crowd [is] parched with thirst.
That is why my people will be carried off into exile, because they do not know. Their leading men will starve, and the common crowd will faint from thirst.
Literal keeps the form: “my people have gone into exile”. Balanced says what the verse means: “my people will be carried off into exile”. The meaning decision behind both is marked uncertain. It reads the verb as a future event spoken of as already done, since the exile of Judah was still to come, and adds that the verse may instead refer to the northern tribes already taken by Assyria. The difference between the levels is a difference of wording, not of meaning: both levels follow the same decision, one by showing the Hebrew form and the other by stating its sense.
Joshua 6:2 shows another way. All three levels keep “I have given”, but Readable adds a short sentence of its own, “It is as good as yours”, and the rendering decision explains why: to carry the sense of the finished verb, that the city is certain to be Israel’s.
Isaiah 9:5: a birth already announced
Isaiah 9:5 is harder, and the record treats it with care. Its meaning decision is marked uncertain. It notes that verses 3, 4 and 5 each begin with “for” and give reasons for the joy of verse 2: the oppressor broken, the war gear burned, and now a royal child. The verbs are in the form for completed action. Then it gives two possibilities without forcing a choice. A prophet can speak of what God will surely do as already done, or announce a birth that has just happened. The passage does not name the child.
Readers have taken both views. Some see a birth in Isaiah’s own time, perhaps a royal heir, celebrated in language that reaches beyond any ordinary king. Many Christian readers see a prophecy of Christ, spoken with the certainty of the prophetic perfect. The two are not always exclusive: some read the verse as speaking of a king in Isaiah’s day whose titles were fully realised only in a later son of David. The record points to the passages around it: 7:14 promised a son called Immanuel, and 11:1–5 describes a king from the line of Jesse.
Here Open Word Bible keeps the past form at every level: “a child has been born for us, a son has been given to us.” It is the form Isaiah used, it fits both readings, and English can carry it without misleading the reader. A future tense would have decided the question for the reader.
Isaiah 53: looking back on the servant
The song of the suffering servant runs from Isaiah 52:13 to the end of chapter 53, and its verbs move through time in a way readers often notice.
It begins in the future. The record for 52:13 gives “my servant will act wisely”, “he will be high and lifted up”. Then, in chapter 53, a group of speakers looks back on what happened to the servant, and the verbs turn to the past:
Yet it was our sicknesses that he bore, our pains that he shouldered, while we took him for a man under a plague, beaten down by God and brought low.
He was despised, he bore our sicknesses, he was pierced for our rebellions. The speakers describe his suffering as something they have seen and misunderstood. At the end of the song, the verbs turn forward again. In verse 12, God will give him a share among the many. The last verb of the song, “he intercedes” for the rebels, is an imperfect, and the record notes that it may describe what he did or what he goes on doing.
Whether the past tenses of chapter 53 are prophetic perfects, describing a future suffering as if it were complete, or the real past of the speakers’ own experience, is a question the poem raises and the grammar alone does not settle. The New Testament reads the whole song as fulfilled in Jesus, and the record for 52:13 notes this (Acts 8:32–35; 1 Peter 2:22–25). Open Word Bible translates the verbs in the tenses the poem itself uses, so that a reader hears the speakers looking back, as the Hebrew presents them.
How the decision is made
For a Hebrew verb, the English tense is never simply copied. It is a meaning decision: what time, and what kind of action, does this verb describe in its context? The clues are the context, the surrounding verbs, the kind of verb (a state or an event), and the kind of text (story, law, psalm or prophecy). Where the clues point one way, the decision says so and gives the reason. Where they do not, the decision is marked uncertain and the alternative is named, as in Psalm 3:6, Isaiah 5:13 and Isaiah 9:5.
The levels then put that decision into words. Literal shows the Hebrew form where English can bear it. Balanced chooses the tense an English reader needs to understand the sense. Readable may add a word or a short sentence to make the time plain. None of them changes what the meaning decision says.
The article Literal, Balanced, Readable: three levels, one meaning explains how the levels work together. For other features of Hebrew that resist English, see Hebrew poetry and parallelism and Wordplay that can’t be translated.
Open Isaiah 9, Isaiah 5 and Isaiah 53 to see the records.