Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George Athas <gathas AT mail.usyd.edu.au>]

Matthew Anstey wrote:

> For those TAMmers, formalists, functionalists, and BH-verb-lovers, can you
> please enlighten me on Psa 13.5 yekoltiyw? The sentence seems to be, "Answer
> me YHWH ... lest my enemy says 'I have overcome him.'"
>
> To me it seems that qatal would be better here, but that is only intuition
> as I get lost in the rules about embedded sentences like this, particularly
> in poetry. Assuming the embedded sentence could be worded this way all by
> itself, since it is direct speech, wouldn't one expect it to me, "Let me
> overcome him," or "I will overcome him."?

Matthew, don't be confused by the initial yodh here - it is not a 
preformative of a
yiqtol (or imperfect) verb, or a jussive verb as you suggest. It is actually 
the first
root letter of root yodh-kaph-lamed, and it actually is a qatal (or perfect) 
verb in
the Qal stem. The afformatives of the qatal verb are there too, the -ti- 
ending,
followed by the object suffix -iyv. Hence, the meaning has a past tense 
force. If the
verb was a yiqtol (or imperfect), then we would expect the 1st person singular
preformative, an aleph.

Best regards,
GEORGE ATHAS
Dept of Semitic Studies,
University of Sydney
- Email: gathas AT mail.usyd.edu.au
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