Biblical Hebrew Forum

["R. Hoberman" <rdhoberman AT ccmail.sunysb.edu>]

Rolf Furuli wrote: "... 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..."  Wait a minute!  The earliest
grammarians of Hebrew may not have had a theory of tense (I don't know) 
but their native language was Arabic, which is much more clearly aspectual
then Hebrew.  So they should have intuitively interpreted Hebrew in terms
of aspect. If they did not, then we may be able to learn something about
the ways in which BH works in terms of tense versus aspect by trying to
understand their point of view.

Robert Hoberman