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  • From: Joseph Justiss <jljustiss AT msn.com>
  • To: biblical hebrew list <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] BH Verbal System (Joseph Justiss)
  • Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:04:02 -0600


It is time for me to make some more comments for clarification.



1. In my original post Sailhamer and Scneider do not use the word "tense" to
refer to verbal forms with built in time reference. They just use it because
of convenience to refer to the various verbal forms encountered in BH's
morphology.



2. Sailhamer would agree that the wayyiqtol does not have past reference.
Their contention is that when a BH author wants to construct a narrative and
signal to his reader that he is refering to events which are no longer
present within the domain of the author-reader context he uses the wayyiqtol
verb form/"tense" to generate a narrative text. When that same author wants
to provide information that is background to the current narrative, or wants
to refer back to an event on a previous wayyiqtol chain he uses qatal verbal
forms.



This system is an attempt to explain the generation of Hebrew narrative texts
moving from form to function. I think it is worthy of serious consideration
because of its ability to explain texts and because after centuries of
studies the best and brightest minds in the field of Hebrew grammar still
lack serious consensus as to the function of the verbal forms. Perhaps this
is not in spite of our methodology, but precisely because of our methodology.
Let's look for a better more promising methodology. I think it will come from
"form to function" approaches and text-linguistics which limits itself to
text immanent data and goes beyond sentence level analysis.



Joseph Justiss

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