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  • From: "B. M. Rocine" <brocine AT twcny.rr.com>
  • To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] 998 non-past wyyqtl's, Dave
  • Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 17:32:53 -0500

Hi Dave, You wrote:

Rocine said: Take paraphrasing with wayyiqtol as an example of "crossing the white
line." When a second wayyiqtol paraphrases or is identicle an earlier one,
the writer and reader's shared world knowledge cooperate with the meaning
of the wayyiqtol. Writer and reader know the same event doesn't happen
twice. Writer and reader both realize we are back-looping with the second
wayyiqtol to cover the same sequence again.

Let me be sure of one thing here: are you indicating that such a "crossing" is
deliberate on the part of the speaker or writer?

Consciousness or deliberateness is a hard thing to pin down. Some students of narrative art examine witers' original manuscripts to try and track their editing to get a handle on what is conscious. In my own writing, some of the choices I make are conscious and some are not or at least less conscious.

To continue your analogy,
in general when someone crosses that line, they do it on purpose, and for
what they consider to be a good reason (whether the other people on the road
think it's a good reason is open to question, of course). If we say the same
thing about a case of "paraphrasing with wayyiqtol" (a term I like), then it
is most likely a deliberate crossing of the boundary, and most likely for a
particular reason. The question would then become "why?" For this
discussion, how about we stick with Judges 12:11, which I think we agree is a
clear example of the phenomenon that you call paraphrasing, if that's okay
with you? Assuming it is, the next logical question is "why did the writer
do such a back-loop?" I'll expand on this below.

About the meaning of the wayyiqtol specifically:
I think Hatav has said it as well an anyone. It's meaning is to create a
new R-time. She has found something like 93-95% (I forget exactly)to do so
in the typical prose corpus. If she were to add other, most notably
poetic, texts, I believe she would find nearly as high a percentage.

While I tend to agree that there is "divergent" grammar (I don't want to say
"bad" grammar when referring to grammar that does something other than what
we expect based on our understanding of the forms) in the HB, I also tend to
think that, barring really strong reasons for divergence or "crossing the
line," we do better to try and find some unified sense within the form that
accounts for at least 99%+ of the data (poetry excepted; poetry does its own
thing in every language). As far as I know, the approach I have chosen does
that. In fact, I have yet to find a counter-example. That's not to say I
have it all figured out, but my "simple declarative" seems to account for an
even higher percentage than Hatav's, even to the point of not only explaining
her "sequence" examples but also her counter-examples. Having said that, I
do acknowledge that her data on modality has spun my head around a few times
and set me on a much different course than before regarding some of the other
forms. Her monograph is one of the most profitable works on the subject that
I have ever read.

99+% can actually be a problem. If we know that this phenomenon exists by which writer/speakers in all languages ignore rules and meanings sometimes, a 99% true explanation seems to me to signal something is actually wrong with the explanation. There's no room in such an explanation for the chaos we know should be there. Unless, of course, we believe BH is the special language of heaven, perfectly predictable and regular. <tongue half in cheek> Personally, I believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God, but I think there is still room to believe that ancient Hebrew is the slightly chaotic language of man.


I don't believe the conclusion that wayyiqtol clauses are the "simple,
active propositions" of BH quite accounts for the data satisfactorily.
Critical to me is that the X-Qatal, the wayyiqtol's partner in
story-telling, is not used as merely the alternative consctruction when the
writer wants to promote an element to the first position of the clause. We
see that the X-qatal is strategically distributed within stories in places
where context indicates non-sequence. It makes sense therefore, that
X-qatal's partner indicates the presence of sequence.

But here's where it gets into trouble in Judges 12:11, because it would be
natural to expect X-qatal in the second clause. I agree completely that the
second wayyiqtol is a restatement/expansion of the first one; the question
is, why did the writer choose to cross the line with a wayyiqtol there
instead of using the more natural X-qatal? I honestly can't think of a
reason, because there doesn't seem to be anything particularly noteworthy or
special about Elon's term: he judged Israel; he judged Israel for X number of
years. That's it. So what would be the point of drawing extra attention to
the number of years by using a "non-standard" wayyiqtol?

This is a great question, the kind of thing I study all the time. I don't know the answer for JDG 12:11, off-hand. I'll look again. I would look first at an explanation in pragmatics, then in text transmission. I would be better at explaining the answer in Gen 7:18, which I did explain quickly in my last post titled "unsequential wayyqtl."

Enjoying the exchange. Thanks.

Shalom,
Bryan

B. M. Rocine
Living Word Church
6101 Court St. Rd.
Syracuse, NY 13206

ph: 315.437.6744
fx: 315.437.6766




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