• Hebrew niphal voice
• Greek aorist in -ην
• anticausative
• middle voice
• perfect
• Septuagint

This study concerns the Hebrew and Greek verbal systems through an analysis of the niphal forms in the Septuagint’s Pentateuch. Through the creation of a corpus of the niphal verbal forms, we observed the corresponding Greek forms: most of the occurrences are translated with Greek aorist in -ην, which is related to the expression of unaccusative values. The unaccusative prototype is represented in one-argument telic unagentive verbs, whose subject corresponds to the entity affected by the event: the aorist in -ην belongs to verbs that entail an affected argument and, therefore, convey the representation of a change of state. The subject of the aorist in -ην matches the direct object of the active transitive constructions: that is, the undergoer argument corresponds to the syntactic subject in the one-argument representation of the event encoded into this aorist and to the syntactic object in the two-argument representation typically encoded by the active transitive constructions. This kind of verbs are the best candidates of the inchoative/causative alternation, in which the anticausative member does not include the representation of the entity responsible for the change of state of the affected argument. Therefore, the aorist in -ην encodes the anticausative member of the alternation and testifies that the niphal expresses anticausative values too. Indeed, the niphal describes an event in which the subject is concerned with itself and reference to an external Agent is absent. The purpose of this study is essentially to provide an account of the distribution of the aorist in -ην and show the principle under its functional organization, through a comparison with Hebrew niphal.