Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Peter Kirk wrote:


>Rolf wrote: "...But the nature (or value) of patah and shewa led [the
>Masoretes] to use these letters in the way we know without having in
>mind the great semantic difference which were ascribed to the letters
>by the grammarians from the 11th century onward..."
>
>Hold on... Are you, Rolf, saying that the Masoretic pointing dating
>from the 9th-10th centuries (is that correct?) was already
>misunderstood in the 11th century? Is it likely that a text preserved
>and understood for over a millennium suddenly, in just one century,
>became understood in a quite different way i.e. non-past we+yiqtol
>suddenly became understood as past wayyiqtol? What catastrophe took
>place to cause such a loss of traditional understanding?
>

Dear Peter,

There were at least three different pointing systems which were used in
different places. All these originated after the fourth century CE. There
were no grammars and little grammatical understanding in these days. The
Masoretes did not even know the three-radical nature of Hebrew words.
However, they pointed their texts as if they knew this, something
indicating that their pointing is reliable. After 1000 CE an interest in
grammar arose, and the first Hebrew grammarians entered the scene. They
made their grammars on the basis of induction and when they interpreted the
verbal system of the MT, they did so on the basis of *tense* because they
did not know aspect (See L McFall: Fhe Enigma of the Hebrew Verbal system,
1982). So the case was not that in the year 1000 people understod Hebrew
grammar in one way and in, say 1050, a misunderstanding arose. But rather,
the Masoretes pointed according to what they heard in the synagogue without
thinking of grammar, and when a need arose for a systematization of
grammar, the pointings of the Masoretes, which were non-grammatical and
which represented an old tradition, where interpreted grammatically, with
misunderstanding as a result.

When an understanding of aspect emerged in the second part of the 19th
century, we got a situation which methodologically is very dubious to say
the least. The "four" conjugations which were described on the basis of
tense were now interpreted as aspects without adjusting the understanding
of which forms were included in each conjugation. Because there is no
on-to-one correspondence between tense and aspect this way of reasoning is
unsound. But this is the basis for the present aspectual understanding.

As a matter of fact, more than 90 per cent of the wayyiqtols represent past
time and more than 90 per cent of the yiqtols and weyigtols represent
present/future time. Thus there was no doubt in the middle ages that the
verbal system had four components which were tenses. However, researchers
today know that 100 000 confirming data do not prove a theory but one or a
few contradicting data may falsify it.
If shewa  in the days of the Masoretes was pronounced as an "a" , (there is
evidence for this) and the difference between shewa and patah is minute,
the particular semantic difference between weyiqtol and wayyiqtol which the
first Hebrew grammarian ascertained need not exist at all. Two suggestions:

People who do not know grammar will all the same understand a text, and the
Masoretes of course understood what they read. Because the difference
between patah and shewa was so little, could it be that they pointed waw +
yiqtol with past meaning with patah and waw + yiqtol with  present/future
meaning with shewa without intending a grammatical difference?

Or, is the difference in nature "pausal"? We observe that wayyiqtol is used
in Biblical narrative to advance the story time. When a narrative text was
recited in the synagogue, would not the high points of the clause be
stressed  (remember that accents represent music and rhytm rather than
stress in the modern sense) ? If this was the case, the Masoretes may have
used patah ( which would necessitate gemination ) in the "pausal" forms and
shewa in others.

The important thing for a modern researcher is to find what is *semantic*
and what is *pragmatic* in relation to a particular verb form. And the best
way to find this is to study the MT and the way wayyiqtol and other forms
are used. A reasonable number of wayyiqtols which definitely have non-past
meaning would for instance falsify the view that the form is preterite.


Regards
Rolf

Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo