Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryan Rocine" <596547 AT ican.net>]

Rolf,

You wrote:
>  Rocine:
>  >1.  Is it poetry?  If so they may be archaic or archaizing yiqtols, the
>  >"old" Historical Narrative mainline form.
>
>  What in the world are archaic or archaizing yiqtols? True, the
expressions
>  are found in the grammars and commentaries, but I have never seen
anything
>  but speculation as to the origin and existence of such forms. It seems
to
>  me that the expressions were coined to try to account for problematic
cases
>  which could not be explained by usual means. If you have any information
>  about such rare animals, please submit it.

Rare?  not so very rare.  Speculation?.......yeah, I guess you can call it
that.  But there is pretty good agreement among philologists from Bauer to
Bergstrasser to Waltke and O'Connor to Hetzron to Pardee, etc. that the
proto form of the wayyiqtol was a prefix form minus the vav and gemination,
i.e., the offspring of the Akkadian *iprus* as in West Semitic *yaqtul*. 
Do you want to fight all these guys?  More power to you; I'm not there.  Do
you want an example of this old yiqtol in BH?  You know the examples better
than me, I have no doubt.  Exo 15:1 and probably 25-30 like cases: 'az
yasir mo$eh.  Or Psa 78:15, etc. yebaqa` curim bamidbar vaya$eq...  

>  >
>  >3.  Is it direct speech embedded within narrative?  If the MT is
correct,
>  >the translators are wrong.  They should have translated the weyiqtols
as
>  >modals, probably volitional forms, "may he, let me, let us, I intend."
>
>  Here you fall back on your model, so please be careful. The reason why
your
>  model works so well, is that narrative in Hebrew are governed by
extremely
>  strict rules of linguistic conventions, but the drawback is that it may
be
>  these linguistic conventions that are the primary reason for the choice
of
>  verbs, thus driving the system, and this is of course a pragmatic
factor.

Agreed.  

Shalom,
Bryan


B. M. Rocine
Associate Pastor
Living Word Church
6101 Court St. Rd.
Syracuse, NY 13208

315-437-6744(w)
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