Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Rodney,

Since you invite my comments, here goes...

I found your idea that wayyiqtol is a kind of "historic present" 
rather interesting. If Galia Hatav is right that the "historic 
present" found in modern languages and also in biblical Greek is not 
well understood, I find it hard to understand the basis for her 
objection to this idea; first clarify the obscure before using it to 
cast light elsewhere. However, as Randall Buth pointed out, it is hard 
to explain weqatal on this model.

On the other hand, Randall's comment "'present' is not the way hebrew 
storytelling is done... BH tells Hebrew stories in the past" simply 
begs the question: in so far as BH tells Hebrew stories with 
wayyiqtol, this statement is true if wayyiqtol is a past tense, but 
false if it is a present tense!

One of the objections often raised to the "traditional" model of 
Hebrew verbs is that the idea of waw "converting" perfect(ive) into 
imperfect(ive) and vice versa is so illogical that it cannot possibly 
be true. Well, languages can be very illogical! But your idea has 
suggested to me a mechanism for how this may have arisen. My (probably 
unfalsifiable!) hypothesis: In early (pre-Biblical) Hebrew stories 
were often told in a type of historic present as you describe, with 
sentences linked by waw, the ancestor of the BH wayyiqtol form. Within 
such narratives "flashbacks" would have been indicated by a past tense 
form, qatal. Gradually the interaction between these verb forms within 
a discourse, a story or narrative, became fossilised into the 
narrative structure which we find in BH. Wayyiqtol came to be thought 
of (by the time when most BH was written) no longer as historic 
present but as a second past tense used (almost) only in narrative. At 
this point in time, when waw started to look like a converting prefix, 
weqatal was formed by analogy. Rather later (beginning by Ezekiel's 
time) the whole scheme broke down, for it had lost its logical basis 
and so had become unstable.

Comments?

Peter Kirk