Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

I must agree with Rolf and others that basically the same grammatical 
forms are used in prose and in poetry, presumably in Hebrew as in 
other languages, though surely we must be careful with such 
generalisations. But I wonder if there is also a diachronic factor in 
play here. From Judges 5 for example we can see how in ancient poetic 
passages the archaic grammar (and vocabulary) has been preserved in a 
matrix of prose which has been updated to, or originally written in, a 
later style using different grammatical forms. Perhaps something of 
the same has happened with other, less archaic poetic passages, which 
preserve some archaic forms and archaic meanings of forms which 
continued in use. There may also be archaising poetry.

Imagine a record of English history consisting of prose passages in 
modern English and extracts from older and mostly poetic writers. We 
would then find lots of "thee" and "thou" forms for example in the 
poetic parts but not in the prose passages. So, within this corpus, 
there is a special "thou dost" verb form used only in poetry. Perhaps 
the Hebrew Bible is something like this, and the supposed differences 
between the use of wayyiqtol in poetry and prose can be explained in 
this way.

Peter Kirk