Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Rolf,

Thank you for your reply (snipped from below to save everyone's 
bandwidth). I realise that I have not fully understood your model and 
terminology, but let me try to reply to you trying to use simplified 
terminology which I and others may understand better.

If I understand you rightly, you are explaining wayyiqtol/qatal 
doublets by saying that wayyiqtol and qatal are forms with 
fundamentally very different meanings, but also very broad "domains of 
meaning", covering almost all possible verb meanings it seems, so that 
in certain contexts one can be substituted by the other with no change 
of pragmatic implicature. That is possible, but surely Hebrew must be 
very ambiguous if the commonest verb forms can be used with almost in 
almost any pragmatic situation. My explanation would be that wayyiqtol 
and qatal are fundamentally quite similar in meaning, and so not 
surprisingly it is common that one can be substituted by the other. 
That is, their "domains of meaning" can overlap without covering 
almost the whole semantic field of verb meanings. Of course there are 
contexts where rather different verb forms can be substituted, e.g. 
wayyiqtol vs. infinitive construct in your Isaiah 37:15 and 2 Kings 
19:15 example. But I would expect this to be relatively rare with 
fundamentally very different verb forms e.g. qatal and yiqtol, for 
which you count 6 examples.

I understand well your often-stated argument that the difference 
between wayyiqtol and weyiqtol is artificial and late. I disagree 
because I see two distinct meanings: wayyiqtol as perfective and 
generally sequential, collocating with qatal; weyiqtol as imperfective 
and collocating with yiqtol. But (as I have said before) there may 
have been some cases in which the distinction between the two forms, 
so similar in sound, had been lost before the time of the Masoretes or 
was incorrectly reconstructed by them. That is the simplest 
explanation of the wayyiqtol/weyiqtol doublet in 2 Samuel 22 and Psalm 
18, and perhaps of a number of other non-past wayyiqtols (not of 
course all the non-sequential ones we argued about recently). On the 
other hand, I have also argued recently on this list that poetry may 
have a different use of verb forms from prose because it represents a 
different stage of development of Hebrew, and no-one has answered my 
argument. In my recent posting I was considering mainly prose as in 
the 2 Kings and Isaiah passages in question. The statistics may work 
differently in poetry. I would be interested in a breakdown of the 
ones you gave between prose and poetry.

You wrote: "Because the supposed opposition between yiqtol/weyiqtol 
and wayyiqtol is non-orthographic and is based upon the function of 
the forms, we must demand that a difference of function is 
consistently followed throughout the Bible." Why? Well, I don't accept 
the premise, as the Masoretes did not invent the vowel points but 
wrote them in according to a tradition of reciting. But even if the 
Masoretes added the pointing themselves, why do we have to demand 
complete consistency? They did work remarkably accurately, but as I am 
finding in my translation project, even with modern computer aids it 
is very difficult to get consistency of verb forms etc right through 
the Bible. Perhaps the 2 Samuel 22 and Psalm 18 differences and many 
of your others were simply the Masoretes' errors? Don't build too much 
on one or two dots!

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re[2]: 2Ki 20:7 and Isa 38:21
Author:  furuli AT online.no at internet
Date:    08/03/1999 16:37