Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Peter,

I have never claimed to have hundreds of examples of non-sequential
wayyiqtols, as you wrote in your last post, because sequentiality has been
of secondary importance to me. But I do claim to have several hundred
examples of wayyiqtols with non-past meaning, which also in many cases may
imply non-sequentiality. My examples from Ruth do not belong to the
mentioned list, but were just stray examples I gathered when I recently
read the book.

I appreciate that you have reached the conclusion that sequentiality is  a
pragmatic implicature as far as wayyiqtol  is concerned, and not its
semantic meaning. Randall also seems to have reached the same conclusion
although his language is ambiguous. So in this respect we all three seem to
agree. But then I do not understand why you are so zealous in using all
kinds of strange arguments to defend the sequentiality of wayyiqtol if you
agree that this property is pragmatic rather than semantic.

To admit that wayyiqtol may express a coordination of two verbs
("hendiadys" to use your words) is tantamount to saying that the
way-element in such situations is nothing more than a simple cunjunction.
So again the map must be modified to fit the scenery! If the way-element in
some cases is just a conjunction, how do you know that it is not a simple
conjunction in *all* instances? (See situations with handiadys without
wayyiqtol, 1 Kings 18:41 "eat and drink", Jer 2:19 "know and see", Isaiah
2:3 "go and ascend"). I have earlier shown that Origen did not
differentiate between wayyiqtol and weyiqtol and that there is no
difference between the forms in unpointed texts. Let me add another
argument, namely, that there is evidence that shewa at Qumran was
pronounced with an "a"-sound. This would reduce or blot out any difference
between a wa(y)- element and a we-element. One piece of evidence is Isaiah
34:6 where the word for "kidneys" in MT is written as KILE:YOT and the
great Isaiah scroll has KL)YWT (shewa is written plene as aleph). If this
is not a scribal error it suggests that shewa was pronounced as "a".

Two more questions:
(1) When you say that wayyiqtol is "past tense", do you defferentiate
between "past tense" and "past meaning"? And if so, how do you know that
wayyiqtol is "past tense" and not only "past meaning"?
(1) You say that X-qatal is "semantically marked for background". Can you
tell what you includ in X-qatal? Do you really mean that what you include
in X-qatal in any context in the whole Bible must be background
information? And how do we identify "background information"? Is the
definiton of "background" that which is expressed by qatal, or is there an
independent method apart from the use of qatal by which we can find what is
background, and thereby test whether qatal always is background?

I made some searches in three narrative books to find coordinated
wayyiqtols. Some of them are:
Deuteronomy
3:1 "turned and went"
4:11 "came near and stood"
8:3 "humbled, caused to hunger, caused to eat" (hendiatris)
9:26 "prayed and said"
17:3 "gone and served"
29:26 "went and worshiped"
Joshua
8:11 "drew near and came before"
8:14 "hurried, rose early, and went out" (hendiatris)
11:17 "struck and killed"
22:9 "turned and left"
24:9 "sent and called
Judges
4:6 "sent and called"
9:7 "went and stood", "raised his voice, cried, and said" (hendiatris)
10:8 "shattered and crushed"
13:10 "hurried, ran. and told" (hendiatris)
13:11 "arose and went"
15:15 "took out his hand, took, and struck (hendiatris)
19:6 "sat, ate, and drank" (hendiatris)
19:14 "passed and went"
20:47 "turned and fled"

You can hardly say that all the examples above are idioms. Rather, some of
them are examples of how the Hebrew mind liked to express the same thing in
two ways (paralellism). Even if all examples were special idioms, this
would not blot out the important fact that the way-element of wayyiqtols
serves as a simple conjunction.  Too often we hear explanations of
difficult passages such as: "But this is poetry", "But this is prophetic
perfect", "But this is this.", and "This is that", as if such arguments
would explain everything. Poetry does not change the semantic meaning of a
verb and a label such as prophetic perfect does not blot out the fact that
the qatal has futute meaning. Problematic passages must be explained by
lexical, grammatic and syntactic arguments (and of course by the context)
and not by the help of labels.


Regerds
Rolf

Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo



>Dear Rolf,
>
>If you remember rightly, a few months ago I brought up the Russian
>idiom "Poshli!" which is past in form but future in meaning, as a
>possible counter-example to some statement of yours (I think) to the
>effect that a past tense must always be past with no exceptions. You
>did not accept this counter-example because it was a special idiomatic
>use. In the same way, the examples of hendiadys which you quoted in
>Ruth are special idiomatic uses which, by your own argument, do not
>count as counter-examples. So to me your post does not contain any
>examples disproving the proposition (which I have recast in positive
>form) "Sequentiality is the semantic meaning of wayyiqtol."
>
>On the other hand, we had a long discussion about this very issue some
>months ago. I found especially telling an example of unmarked temporal
>overlay in the Joseph narrative. The conclusion I and some others
>reached was that "Sequentiality is not the semantic meaning of
>wayyiqtol," but rather that wayyiqtol is the default unmarked past
>tense, which is usually but not always sequential by pragmatic
>implicature, whereas other past tense forms such as X-qatal are
>semantically marked for background, temporal overlay or however one
>might put it.
>
>Peter Kirk
>