Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Paul Zellmer <zellmer AT cag.pworld.net.ph>]

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