Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Peter Kirk wrote:

>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!
>

Dear Peter,

Your post above demonstrates that our linguistic methods and approaches are
fundamentally different. I am aware that language is not perfect and
neither were the copyists. With the study of Hebrew verbs, however, I find
the typical situation related to the scientific revolutions mentioned by
Thomas Kuhn. In time, more and more data accumulate against a scientific
paradigm (model), but it is explained away ad hoc. So, by the same forces
which are behind a religious revival, the paradigm changes and a new one
enters the scene.

I do not feel well with suggestions that the Masoretes probably made errors
regarding the data speaking against the traditional model: I accept the
possibility, but would like to see it demonstrated before I accept it.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever demonstrated that the meaning
of verbs is different in poetry that in prose. If you have some references,
I appreciate that. I would also add that to date portions of the text on
linguistic grounds, is extremely difficult if not impossible, perhaps
except the latest books.






Regards
Rolf


Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semtic languages
University of Oslo