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b-hebrew - Periphrastics in Is 2:2 and Micah 4:1 (retransmission)

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  • From: Paul Zellmer <zellmer AT cag.pworld.net.ph>
  • To: list b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Periphrastics in Is 2:2 and Micah 4:1 (retransmission)
  • Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 07:39:58 +0800

Rolf, don't feel so alone with the lack of responses that you mentioned in your post, "Different verb forms - same meaning?"  I also have received no responses to my posting on what looks like periphrastics, and my question was not even part of a search for resolution of a great philosophical debate.  It was simply a request for clause-level analysis of a couple of passages.

I wrote:

It appears to me that the YiHYeH ... NfKoWN ... W:Ni&&f) in Micah
4:1 is a
compound periphrastic.  The parallel passage in Is 2:2 has the
first participle
preceding the yiqtol.  Generally I interpret this periphrastic as
clearly placing the durative concept of the participle in future
time and a distribution of the yiqtol of HfYfH over both
participles [hence "compound"].  (I could be all wet here, but I
don't think so.  We see a
similar construction in Ex 26:3.  Of course, I would have liked
to have seen a qatal + participle in Ex 36:10, but there's a
wayyiqtol instead.)  My question:  Can a periphrastic
construction have the participle *precede* the "helping verb," as
appears to be the case in Is 2:2?  If so, what is the
significance?  Is it focussing (or, to use Bryan's terminology,
topicalizing) the activity expressed by the participle?

Also, in the Micah passage, for this to be periphrastic, we have
the verb and the first participle split by the subject.  Now, I
realize
this is a common construction in Greek, but isn't it unusual in
the Hebrew?  What significance do you make of the Micah
construction?
 
Many of you responded to another post on the cohortative form of 3rd-he verbs, and I thank you for that.  (I'll admit that that one *was* written with a small bit of an agenda, although it also was an honest attempt to verify the identification of the form.  Bryan, you stole my thunder by the points you made that discourse analysis clearly identified a form which was completely ambiguous on word level, and still unclear on clause level.)

Any help on the periphrastic question would be appreciated.

Paul
--
Paul and Dee Zellmer, Jimmy Guingab, Geoffrey Beltran
Ibanag Translation Project
Cabagan, Philippines

zellmer AT faith.edu.ph
 



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