Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Rolf,

Thank you for your attention to these passages.

You wrote: "The RSV translates 484 weqatals as past tense, and this fact 
alone is enough to falsify any claim of weqatal being a future tense."

I am very suspicious about such statistics when they take no note of the 
context.

"In Ex 36: 29,30 and 38 we find three weqatals with past meaning. A 
challenge to those saying that qatals with enclitic we with past meaning 
are not weqatals: Please design a method which is not circular to 
differentiate between the two!"

Interesting point! See below.

"...Thus only weqatals, wayyiqtols (and weyiqtols) were available as 
sentenc initial verbs and only yiqtols and qatals were available as medial 
verbs. What evidently became a linguistic convention in Hebrew was to use 
wayyiqtol and qatal in past contexts and yiqtol and weqatal in future 
contexts."

Indeed. Everything (more or less) in human language is linguistic 
convention, so it seems like you are close to agreeing to the traditional 
model in which in biblical Hebrew wayyiqtol is nearly equivalent to qatal, 
and weqatal is at least sometimes nearly equivalent to yiqtol. I don't 
understand all your long discussion of aspect and the distinction between 
semantics and pragmatics, but I don't think it clarifies the matter.

"How do you for instance explain the weyiqtol at the beginning of Ex 26:24? 
It is hardly an error because the corresponding verse in chapter 36 is 
equally "strange", beginning with a weqatal with past meaning and 
continuing with the same yiqtol with past meaning which 26:24 uses with 
future meaning."

I would account for this by expanding your "linguistic convention" model to 
say something like that in past contexts the convention was to use 
wayyiqtol and qatal for main line and qatal and weqatal for background; and 
in future contexts the convention was weqatal and yiqtol for main line and 
yiqtol and weyiqtol for background. Thus weqatal comes in twice; in future 
contexts corresponding to wayyiqtol in past, as most commonly in Ex. 26 and 
36; and in past contexts corresponding to weyiqtol in future, as in Ex. 
36:29||26:24 - these verses being a type of flashback. These different 
"weqatals" can be distinguished by their context, specifically which other 
verb forms they come in sequence with. I think this more or less 
corresponds to the discourse analysis description, though that would focus 
more on type of discourse rather than past and future.

But the point is not that "weqatal" does not carry its own TAM, but rather 
that there are two separate TAMs, homonyms if you like, which are encoded 
in the same weqatal form. Compare English "read" or "put", which can be 
either past or "present" except in 3rd person singular, but it would be 
wrong to say that they are tenseless and better to say that two different 
tenses have by chance the same form. Compare also the Hebrew regular yiqtol 
and jussive, which (as normally understood at least) are two separate verb 
forms whose forms have largely but not completely coalesced.

Peter Kirk