Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Peter Kirk wrote:
> One for Dave to duck, or to try to answer:
[helmet on]

> If weqatal is nothing but qatal which happens to have a conjunction, 
> why are the instructions for building the tabernacle (for example) 
> full of weqatal's and yiqtol's but no qatal's; where the corresponding 
> account of the building is largely identical except that it has 
> wayyiqtol's and qatal's but no yiqtol's?

Give me a couple of days to look at it...at the moment this idea is 
little more than a working hypothesis, because I haven't dug into it 
yet.  I decided to play devil's advocate for a moment and toss it out 
for consideration, hoping for just this sort of discussion.  

> If we look at the clause level, I am not sure how to account for this 
> data apart from a "traditional" four component model with something 
> like a "waw conversive". Then there is a separate issue of deciding 
> how this strange system arose (but there are many very strange things 
> in real human languages!)

I tend to ignore the questions of how such things arose because 
they really don't have much (if any) bearing on the questions I'm 
asking myself.  However, I see no reason to resort to a conversive 
idea simply because a language made profuse use of conjunctions, 
as Rolf already mentioned.  In fact, after reading Rolf's post on this, 
my short-form response is: what he said.

> If we are to move anywhere beyond such a traditional view, I am sure 
> we need to look above the clause level. So my advice to Dave would be 
> to brush up his discourse studies before taking his studies further.

I'm attempting to do that, but I have to disagree that we have to go 
above the clause level to move beyond the "conversive" idea.  My 
goal (unattainable? Perhaps, but worth trying) is to do just that 
from the clause level.


Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.