Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vincent J. DeCaen" <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>]

wondering how the discourse crowd would handle two problems.

(1) 1sam1:12,  W:HFYFH K.IY HIR:B.:TFH L:HITP.AL."L ...
all commentaries, etc, say, read wayhi for wehayah. no less authority
than GKC insists on reading it so, and the confusion could be explained
with the old hebrew script. but... I don't want to mess with the text,
especially since there are other instances (6 or 7 in samuel?).
what do you discourse guys do with this? do you modify the text to fit a
given theory, or does your theory have to respect the text?

(2) Jonah v.2. L"K: ..... W.Q:RF) .....
seems to me based on my experience of standard hebrew that you might
expect weqara'ta, that is a sequential, rather than uqra' the plain
imperative. what does a discourse grammar do? do we say that the two
forms would mean something different: weqara'ta vs. uqra'? or do we say
that jonah represents a later dialect without weqatal? etc?
what does your method tell you? is there only one dialect and so one
discourse grammar? are there many dialects, each with its own grammar?
what?

just curious. I sympathize with the discourse agenda, but I often wonder
about method and implementation.

cheers
V