Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>PK: I understand your doubts about labels. In your terms, I suppose
>the alleged prophetic perfects would be cases in which the prophet is
>projecting him/herself into a reference time at the consummation of
>the prophecy or in the last day and so looking at all events as past.
>If so one would at least expect consistency within a passage. But I
>don't see why you are so strongly saying that verb forms cannot be
>used differently in different genres composed at different times. I
>would expect to find some differences between Shakespeare's use of
>verbs and modern English prose usage.
>
Dear Peter,

I would like to clear up one misunderstanding: I am not saying that verb
forms cannot be used differently in different genres composed at different
times. To the contrary, an important side of my research is to find if this
is the case, and if so, to which extent they are used differently.

What I reject, is the *a priori* view that verb forms are used differently
in different genres composed at different times. This means that a claim
that a wayyiqtol or a qatal has a different meaning in poetry than in prose
should be demonstrated and not just presumed. So far I have not seen a
single study which has given evidence in this direction.

Alviero has constructed a system for narratives which is remarkably
consistent. However, while it also works more or less smoothly in several
non-narrative contexts, it will not work well for the non-narrative
material as a whole. This fact suggests that what the system describes is
function (pragmatics) rather than semantics.  It is not presumtuous to
claim that a model supposed to explain the semantic meaning of verb
forms,which is to be taken seriously, should be able to account for *all*
the verbs in the corpus.  Is there, for instance, any language in the world
where a particular verb form has one meaning in narrative contexts and a
different meaning in other contexts?

A diachronic study may be more promising, because we know that meaning is
changed through time. While we see a certain development in what is called
"Late Biblical Hebrew", I am not aware of evidence suggesting that the
basic verbal meaning has changed. Some of my students read "The Rule of
Discipline" from Qumran, this semester, and the impression I get from this
and other documents, is that even at this late time, the old verbal system
was intact. However, a study of the Isaiah "a" scoll and the Habbaquq
commentary reveal that wayyiqtols and yiqtols could also be used
interchangeable, as we also find in non-narrative texts in the OT.


Regards
Rolf


Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo