havah

Hebrew has two verbs for being, and this is the rare one. The common verb (הָיָה) turns up thousands of times; this one carries this meaning in only five verses, scattered across a father's blessing, a poem about refugees, a hostile letter, and two lines of Ecclesiastes. Where it does appear it is doing the ordinary work of the common verb, so an English translation shows nothing unusual.

What holds its handful of uses together is a pull toward coming to be rather than simply existing. Three of the five ask someone to step into a position they do not yet hold: a son told to be master of his brothers, a people told to be a hiding place for the hunted, a governor accused of setting himself up as king. The other two ask what has ended up being the case: what a person actually gets out of a lifetime of work, and where a fallen tree stays.

Its distribution is the interesting part. It shows up in poetry and in the later books, and it matches the everyday Aramaic verb for being, consonant for consonant, which is why most of these verses are read as Hebrew reaching for an Aramaic flavored form rather than as a special Hebrew word with its own force.

This meaning rests on a single verse. In a hymn about God's command of the weather, God speaks to the snow, and the verb tells it where to go: down. Most modern English Bibles read "Fall on the earth"; older ones read "Be thou on the earth", taking the word in its usual sense of being.

Two things pull translators toward falling. The same three consonants make a common Arabic verb meaning "to fall", and the same root gives Hebrew a noun for ruin and disaster. Whether that means a second verb happens to look like the first, or one verb whose range once ran from falling through happening to being, is a genuine disagreement among the standard dictionaries of biblical Hebrew.

Either way, this is not the ordinary Hebrew word for falling (נָפַל), which does that plain work everywhere else. The point here is not that snow lies on the ground but that it was sent there.