Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

 Dear Peter,

>
>Thank you. But I am not convinced about Turkish: just to rename the
>Turkish present tense (from its morpheme) "Suffix-yor" does not stop
>it being a morphologically marked present tense. Now one might argue
>that the marking has functions other than present e.g. continuous, and
>I don't know Turkish deeply enough to argue that one. (On one side,
>-du/-di is simple past tense and -yor-du is continuous past or
>imperfective; on the other hand, there is no separate non-continuous
>present tense in Turkish). I have to suspect Dahl or Olsen of forced
>interpretation here.

Today I spoke with a collegue who is teaching Turkish.  he sided with you
against Dahl/Broman Olsen. I will ask for Broman Olsen's opinion.
>
>I accept your argument on the Russian example, but then you have to be
>sure that certain uses of Hebrew wayyiqtols are not similarly
>idiomatic. The examples with hendiadys I mentioned recently (Lambdin
>section 173) may be in this category, also perhaps the poetic use of
>two contrasting tenses to indicate complete coverage of time, which
>Bryan mentioned (which I found in Ps 2:1,2, though not with
>wayyiqtol).
>
>Certainly 500 convincing cases of non-past wayyiqtol will be an
>impressive collection - assuming that that is not 490 examples of the
>same idiom or something like that. That makes a big difference from
>the one or two examples of a usage which people sometimes quote,
>especially when these are open to other interpretation. Even if the
>interpretation seems somewhat forced (especially if a quite different
>one is traditional), it is very hard for us to be sure of what was
>meant in a particular sentence. Suppose we had an equivalent to your
>German "strahlendes Wetter" example in Hebrew, and no native speakers
>to ask about it. Then we would have no way of being sure about it. If
>traditionally it had been interpreted as heavy rain (e.g. because the
>LXX translators had made a mistake), but someone then proposed that it
>means sunshine, we might easily easily accuse them of forced
>interpretation, but they would be right. But I would agree that if we
>start putting different forced interpretations on a whole list of
>verses, perhaps our method is suspect.


Your example regarding Hebrew and "strahlendes Wetter" is important, and
even more important is your last clause: "perhaps our method is suspect"?
All of us would naturally defend our own methodology, otherwise we had
discarded it long ago. There is of course no *true* methodology, but what
surprised me and frightened me when I started to study Hebrew verbs many
years ago, was the almost comple lack of linguistic studies discussing the
*fundamental parts* of the verbal system. It is not so that Hebrew grammars
and monographs for a long time, beyond doubt, have demonstrated that
wayyiqtol is past tense and not just past time, but the difference between
*past tense* and *past time* has never (?) been discussed at all, but it
has been taken for granted that past use means past tense. In fact, I am
not aware of a single study (except my own mag.art. thesis) which in a
systematic way has studied the verbal system from the point of view of
which parts are pragmatic and which are semantic. I will remind you of the
studies of the two leading semitists aorund the middle of the century, H.
Brikeland and M. Black who both defended the preterite view of wayyiqtol.
They rivewed the same material of about 120 contrary examples, and both
concluded that the examples did not speak against a past-tense
understanding. However, Birkeland argued that all examples, save one or two
represented past tense, while Black argued that almost all examples
represented non-past time, and they were evidently wrongly pointed by the
Masoretes.

If we are aware of the important difference between pragmatic and semantic
features ( such as "time" and "tense"), the first question we must ask is:
"How do we know that the enclitic element in wayyiqtol is not a simple
conjunction and that wayyiqtol simply is and+yiqtol? If we answer: "But
wayyiqtol is the narrative tense by which the account is brought forward,
so it must be different from yiqtol, which does not do this.", then we have
completely ignored the difference between pragmatics and semantics. Nobody
denies the fact about the mentioned narrative function, but *why* is it
like this? The first step towards a fundamental linguistic discussion
arguing for a preterite understanding of wayyiqtol, must be to show that it
is impossible that a simple "and" (without any kind of mysticism) can move
the narrative forwards together with an imperfective verb. I have already
asked Galia for such a demonstration, but others are also welcome.

 Think of Aviero's interpretation of Job 3:3 where he said that the process
of being born was focussed opon, and the reason was of course that the verb
is past and telic. If this view is possible in Job 3:3, and we assume that
all wayyiqtols are yiqtols+and, it must also be possible to apply this
interpretation to them, and then we get a chain of past events, one after
the other, where a small part of the event or state is focussed upon (This
viewpoint, which is strange for us, can be seen in Aramaic, Syriac and
Ge'ez, compare for instance all the examples in  Jan Joosten: "The Syriac
language of Peshitta and old Syriac versions of Matthew : syntactic
structure, inner-Syriac developments and translation technique", Leiden :
Brill, 1995.). It is not necessary to focus upon the end, because the end
in each case is pragmatically implied.

What I therefore suggest is a comparison of *all* the verb forms in the
Hebrew Bible to find which parts of the system are semantic and which are
pragmatic. ( If anybody believes that the meaning of a verb form (its
time/tense, aspect or mood) in non-narratives is different from narratives,
please demonstrate it! And if that is not done, please stop using the
phrase (which in this case must be empty) "But this is poetry" as a part of
an explanation. A verb marked for past  tense is just as much past tense in
poetry as in prose!  It is not necessary to read much of the Hebrew Bible
to realize that the present four-component model is hoplessly inadequate to
account for all the verbs of the Bible. Just read  Isaiah 40-45, Psalm 107
, and Psalm 18/2 Samuel 22.  This is a very fine test of any theory. A
grammatical theory which cannot account for all the forms of these chapters
has serious inadequacies.

I conclude that grammars such as the one of Alviero Niccacci and the one
by Bryan Rocine represent  excellent tools to help us explore syntactic
patterns for prose and giving the reader much insight, and theses such as
the one of Vincent DeCaen give us much insight from another point of view.
But none of these studies can uncover the *fundamental meaning* of Hebrew
verbs, because such a *meaning* is already  *assumed* (in different ways in
the mentioned studies),  and is a part of the theory which is tested
against the biblical data. It is difficult to find the meaning of verbs in
a dead language, but without an acute awareness of the difference between
pragmatic and semantic factors and a model scrupulously differentiating
between them, I cannot see how meaning can be found at all. Even a solution
to the "Wasserstrahl"-problem can be solved this way. So my
"minimal-pair"-way should be a complement to the "discourse-analysis"-way.



Regards
Rolf

Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo