Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Henry Churchyard  wrote


>> Regarding my comment on 2 Kings 7:4 What I wanted to say was that in
>> pausal forms of qatal with penultimate stress, a wf-prefix (and not
>> a we-prefix) would even mark consecutive perfects, suggesting that
>> wa- and we- are the same lexeme.
>
>But this waa- (i.e. wa- spelled with qamets not preceding guttural +
>h.at.eph-pathah.) occurs before different verb tenses, before nouns --
>basically before any part of speech whatever in more or less "pausal"
>position (Gesenius and Kautsch 1910:306-307).  I don't see how you
>naturally get from wa- with qamets occurring grammatically
>indiscriminately before any pausal form with intial stressed syllable,
>to wa- with pathah. which geminates a following consonant that occurs
>only before specific verb forms (without distinction between pausal
>and non-pausal).  To me these remain two different things.

Dear Henry,

As something similar to my view expressed above, let me bring a quote from
Hans-Peter Muller "wa- und ha- und das Imperfektum consecutivum",
Zeitschrif fur Althebraistik, 1991: 147:

"Von erheblichem Gewicht zur Begrundung der Vermutung, dass es sich bei we-
und bei wa- + Dagesh forte um dasselbe Lexem handelt, ist schliesslich die
Beobachtung, dass in Pausa bei Penultimabetonung wa- /long a/ nun doch vor
Afformativkonjugationen, also zur Kennzeichnung des Perfectum consecutivum,
erscheint; wamatnu "so werden wir sterben" 2 Kron 7,4; das altertumliche
wa-, das ja auch vor Gutturalen mit Hatef-Patah eintritt, kan also
grundsatzlich vor beiden Konjugationen - wie in bestimmten
Nominalverbindungen und auch sonst vor Tonsilben - erscheinen."


>
>> 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.
>
>I'm still not sure whether you think that the Tiberian consecutive
>imperfect is a survival from the early Semitic *yaqtul preterite or an
>invention of 1000 A.D.  If your position is the latter, then there are
>some awful suspicious coincidences regarding stress position, "e"/"o"
>vowels instead of long "i"/"u" vowels in final syllables, etc. that
>need to be explained away...


In the study of Hebrew verbs it is sound to differentiate between form and
function, between what is a semantic part of a verb and what is pragmatic
implicature. I have not found any one form which only is used for a
particular tense, but yiqtol, wayyiqtol, weyiqtol, qatal and weqatal can
all be used for past, present and future. True the frequency is different,
but this can be explained by pragmatics, by linguistic convention. Nobody
has ever explained satisfactory how a simple conjunction can change a
yiqtol to the very opposite, and my working hypothesis is that there is no
semantic difference between yiqtol and wayyiqtol, but both represent the
imperfective aspect.

In the MT there are 5 special characteristics of wayyiqtol compared to
other prefix forms: (1) the patah, (2) gemination, (3) stress retraction,
(4) the apocopated form is mostly used, and (5) it is sentence initial. In
unpointed texts only (4) and (5) are visible, but these characteristics
need not be distinctive because modals may also be sentence initial and
weyiqtols may also be apocopated. My view up to the present moment, is that
(1), (2), (3) and (4) in many roots need not be four different
characteristics but only one, and therefore we need only account for this
one. As an expert in phonetics, I am interested to hear if you agree with
this.

Even though there may be nothing in unpointed texts that definitely can
identify a wayyiqtol, I do not say that such a difference did not exist. I
am aware of several important differences in the Semitic languages which
are hard to detect in unpointed texts. I do not dispute your conslusion
that a stress pattern similar to wayyiqtol can be found in Ugaritic texts,
but I am of course eager to see your data. My point is, however, that even
if we find such a stress pattern, this does not prove that wayyiqtol is
preterite and that a similar preterite existed in Ugaritic. All it tells is
that a similar stress pattern existed in both languages.

It seems to me that the Ugaritic data speaks in favour of the Hebrew verb
being non-deictic.
T.L. Fenton, 1963, "The Ugaritic Verbal System", doctoral thesis, Oxford,
found that yqtl in Ugaritic is the normal narrative form in literary texts,
and sometimes this form is found with enclitic "u". He found 561 examples
of yqtl with past meaning, 70 as past continuous, and 191 with future
meaning. I.D. Marcus, 1971, "Aspects of the Ugaritic Verb in the Light of
Comparative Semtitic Grammar", Ph.D. diss. Columbia univ. USA and D.H.
Madvig, 1966, "A Grammar of the Royal Assyrian Annals of the Sargonid
Dynasty", Ph.D diss., Brandeis univ. USA, confirm that yqtl is the normal
narrative form in Ugaritic. All the examples of a future meaning of yqtl
both speaks against the view that it was preterite and that it was the
perfective aspect. Instead the data suggest that the imperfective aspect
was the normal narrative form, and this is certainly a treat to an
interpretation of wayyiqtol as different from yiqtol. A younger Semitic
language where we possibly can see the same trend is Syriac. In many texts
we have scores of examples of participle+perfect (defined as durative past)
as narrative form (See J. Joosten's dissertation on the syriac text of
Matthew ).

To answer your question directly I will say: I am not aware of any evidence
(i.e. data where the question of semantics versus pragmatics systematically
has been applied) that an old Semitic language had a prefix form, short or
long which expressed past tense. Origen was not aware of the wa/we
distinction of the Masoretes and there is no evidence that this distinction
either before or after Origen signalled any tense-difference. All the
evidence suggests that the Masoretes did not point their texts on the basis
of grammar, so the difference they introduced between wayyiqtol and
yiqtol/weyiqtol was not grammatical. When grammar became the issue of the
day, this difference was misconstrued as a signal of a tense difference,
and the four-component model was born. The stress which the Masoretes
evidently heard in the synagogue and which may have been the main reason
for the wayyiqtol form, might have had a counterpart in Ugaritic. But if
so, there is no evidence that this stress represented past tense.

Two questions: (1) What can be held against the suggestion that the sole
reason for wayyiqtol in many/most instances is the stress ascribed to it
(almost pausal) because it is the form that moved the narrative forward?
(2) Could you give an example or two of the "awful suspicious coincidences
regarding stress position, "e"/"o" vowels instead of long "i"/"u" vowels in
final syllables, etc. that
need to be explained away." if the wayyiqtol originated with the Masoretes?


Regards
Rolf

Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo