Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT sil.org]

Dear Bryan,

Thank you for your clear response. It seems I have not read your past 
postings as carefully as I should have and have confused your position 
with others'. Sorry. But that means that I must disagree with you in 
ways that I did not think I did.

I would like to agree with you that verb forms in prose and poetry 
have the same meanings. But it does seem that there is more 
flexibility in poetry. So when you write of finding "statistically 
small but *quality* attestations", I wonder if attestations in poetry, 
especially rare ones, can ever have the quality required. There is 
also the textual issue that WAYYIQTOL and WEYIQTOL may sometimes have 
been confused when the text was pointed.

The crucial point for me is the following. You wrote:

     Many experts on verbal semantics assert that the morphology of a 
     language's verbs will exhibit a consistent meaning. That seems 
     intuitively obvious.  In the terms of BH, it seems intuitively 
     obvious that prefixed forms will share a meaning with prefixed 
     forms and suffixed with suffixed...

I am sorry, but it is "intuitively obvious" to me that this statement 
is wrong, at least when applied to Hebrew YIQTOL and WAYYIQTOL forms. 
Here we have two forms which (apart from the prefix) are identical for 
the majority of verbs, but different in a significant minority of 
verbs (III-He/Yod verbs and "hollow" verbs). Those differences have to 
be accounted for, and a phonological explanation is difficult. 
However, there is evidence from cognate languages that the two are 
derived from originally completely different paradigms. If they are 
different paradigms, there is no reason to expect their meanings to be 
related. I know that this does not solve all of the problems, 
especially concerning QATAL and WEQATAL, but it is surely enough to 
make one reexamine any conclusions reached solely on apparent identity 
of form, especially when they are not supported by the great majority 
of occurrences of the verb forms.

We have a very similar situation in English with the simple past tense 
and the past participle. For most verbs the forms coincide e.g. "had" 
and "had". In a significant minority of verbs the forms differ e.g. 
"did" and "done". Sometimes the two get confused, as in the last line 
of "Amazing Grace", the apparently ungrammatical "Than when I first 
begun." But no-one doubts that these are derived from originally 
different forms in Germanic and old English, with different meanings 
e.g. the past participle has a passive meaning component which is not 
found in the simple past verb. I can quite imagine that if someone 
came across an English text "for the first time this week" and started 
to study its verb forms (without using comparative evidence or native 
speakers), they would be rather confused by this to start with, and 
some would want to argue that the forms were originally identical. But 
that does not mean that they were correct, rather that they had come 
to a wrong conclusion from a shortage of good evidence.

So let me ask the question this way: If YIQTOL and WAYYIQTOL were 
quite different in form, and QATAL and WEQATAL were quite different in 
form, would you have any good evidence for shared meaning component 
within these pairs?

I see your example from Exodus 25:10 and 37:1. OK, you have a point 
that in this one unique case the maker of the ark is specified and in 
the other it is more general "the Israelites" (25:2). But let's look 
at a pair of verses like 25:31 and 37:17:

25:31 W:(F&IYTF M:NORAT ZFHFB +FHOWR
      MIQ:$FH T."(F&EH HAM.:NOWRFH Y:R"KFH. W:QFNFH.
      G.:BIY(EYHF K.AP:T.OREYHF W.P:RFXEYHF MIM.EN.FH YIH:YW.

37:17 WAY.A(A& )ET-HAM.:NORFH ZFHFB +FHOWR
      MIQ:$FH (F&FH )ET-HAM.:NORFH Y:R"KFH. W:QFNFH.
      G.:BIY(EYHF K.AP:T.OREYHF W.P:RFXEYHF MIM.EN.FH HFYW.

Here also I grant that there is more definiteness in 37:17 than in 
25:31. Concerning the fientive/attributive distinction which you 
wanted to make, I would agree that the WAYYIQTOL WAY.A(A& in 37:17 is 
fientive, and that one could call the QATALs (F&FH and HFYW. 
"attributive" though I would prefer to see the difference in terms of 
focus on particular details. But then compare with 25:31. Surely if 
WAY.A(A& is fientive, then W:(F&IYTF (WEQATAL) is also, and if (F&FH 
and HFYW. are attributive, then T."(F&EH and YIH:YW. are also. I don't 
see how the change of time or discourse type in otherwise almost 
identical sentences can change the value of such meaning components as 
fientive and attributive, especially in such an oddly crossed over 
manner. People rightly mock the concept of "waw conversive", but this 
"time conversive" or "discourse type conversive" suggestion seems to 
me far harder to explain - and I see no evidence (apart from the 
partial convergence of verb paradigms) that it actually happens.

I appreciate your idea of giving the QATAL a meaning like "he was a 
maker of...". But to try to extend this to WEQATAL in the context of 
Exodus 25 is quite inappropriate. In English "They will be makers..." 
implies some kind of profession or at least habit. But in this case 
the point is that they were to make one and one only lampstand, ark 
etc. If such glosses are needed, I would gloss X + QATAL as "he was 
the one who made...", but I see no reason to gloss WEQATAL as anything 
but "then he will make". I cannot explain the change in time here, but 
I have not seen any other explanations which are more than 
speculation.

I had better stop so that I am not too long-winded. Yes, indeed let 
the debate continue. But I am far from being convinced of your 
position.

Peter Kirk