Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Rolf,

> It seems that I still have not managed to express my question in an
> understandable way. I am aware that the functions of those forms which are
> pointed as wayyiqtols and those which are pointed as weyiqtols in MT
> generally are different.  But I also know that there is no difference
> between the forms in unpointed texts and that Origen did not differentiate
> between wayyiqtols and weyiqtols, but all forms have an initial ou in his
> manuscripts. What I want to explore, therefore, is whether the difference
> between wayyiqtol and weyiqtol is semantic or pragmatic. We must remember
> that the morphologic difference between the two forms need not be great, it
> need not be more than the difference between patah and shewa, which would
> be a very small difference. An example is ma-yyfgel  in Psalm 21:2: Is the
> reason for the gemination and retraction of stress only the patah after mem
> or is it something else?

That there is some morphological difference, I think, cannot really 
be denied.  The whole distinction between long and short forms of 
yiqtol is built on that difference, to name just one bit of evidence.  
More important, the weyiqtols that I have seen are modal, whereas 
it's clear that wayyiqtol isn't.  So I suspect that the differences 
between them (whether pointed or unpointed) are much more than 
semantic or pragmatic.  As for the Ps. 21 example, it looks like a 
scribal error to me, either that or an artificial gemination for the 
sake of the meter the Masoretes wanted to put into it.

> There is the possibility that the Masoretes used two vowels, which in their
> eyes where almost identical (there is much evidence that shewa often was
> pronounces as an "a" in Masoretic times), one for narratives and the other
> for other situations, and that the great difference that seems to be
> between the two can be ruduced to something very small. On this background
> I do not ask whether there is a functional difference between wayyiqtols
> and weyiqtols in MT, this is clear.  But if we leave alone everything we
> know about wayyiqtol and weyiqtol, and just ask. Is there any function of
> wayyiqtol which would not be accounted for if the prefix was just a
> conjunction and nothing more? We do not need statistics or discussions to
> answer this question. All we need, is to point to one side of wayyiqtol
> that requires more than a simple conjunction. So far, nobody has done that.

But this is exactly the sort of thing that I have been doing in my 
own writings!  I argue at length that, given the usages we see, it 
can't be a conjunction but must be a grammatical formative on the 
verb itself, signaling a distinctive function.  The fact that it uses the 
same consonant as the conjunction is no more significant than the 
fact that he-interrogative uses the same consonant as the definite 
article.  I won't go into the details here, but I think the answer to 
your question is still "yes, there is a definite morphological 
difference that we can detect based on a combination of word-
formation, modality and context."  

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.