Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Dave.

I have read Galia's chapter 4. I have no objections to her semantic and
philosophic discussion of modality, although, as she herself recognizes,
this is not the only way to describe modality. I will also express my
agreement with her that Biblical Hebrew is a tenseless language.

While her theoretical framwork is fine and it is used in an intelligent way
to analyze the material, I have one concern, namly, that Hebrew fishermen
and peasants of old did not know the difference between R, E, t1 and t2.
They simply used the language according to the linguistic convention they
had learned from childhood, and on this basis they chose a particular form
for a particular use. While modern theoretical analyzes are fine tools, we
must also take the actual situation 2.500 years ago into account.

I therefore would take a simpler approach to the question of modality, and
start with the definition of indicative as an expression of an act, state,
or occurence as actual (or factual) in contrast with statements expressing
volition or attitude. Then I will apply this to to the verbs of the bible
and take note of the actual use. The purpose is to find out whether
modality to the Hebrew of old was restricted to volition and attitude.
Immediately I face two problems: (1) Several cohortatives seem to express
what is factual, and (2) the normal verb used in narratives to express
actual occurrences in the past, WAYYIQTOL, most often have the shortened,
modal, form of the verb. I do not think we can solve this with modern
semantic logic, but we have to ask whether modality for the Hebrew included
areas which we would express by using indicative.

I have not looked at all og Galia's analyzes of particular passages, but
they generally seem to be sound. What I question, however, is the
connection between the examples interpreted as modal and the *form* used to
express them. And this is of course based on my previous objection, that it
is not established that WEQATAL is a semantic (uncancellable) entity whith
a different meaning than WE+QATAL  and QATAL. This difference must be
DEMONSTRATED before we can reach any definitive conclusions. A chain is not
stronger than its weakest link.

Let me bring a quote to illustrate what may be termed "the synonymal
fallacy". J.P. Louw (1982, "Semantics of New Testament Greek", p 62) gave
the following apt definition of synonyms:
"Synonyms are not words that HAVE the same meaning, but words that
sometimes, or probably quite often, CAN be used for the same meaning."
It seems to me that very often in Hebrew studies, it is taken for granted
that verbs USED similarly have the same SEMANTIC MEANING (e.g. QATAL and
WAYYIQTOL, YIQTOL and QATAL). This reasoning simply is fallacious! A
similar use does not tell more than that both forms can be used in this
particular situation (and this is tautologuous), not that the forms have
the same meaning.

Therefore I think we need to start with the smallest entities and fix their
meaning before we can fix the meaning of more complex entities. A simple
approach is that we start with the fact that we in Hebrew have a
prefix-form and a suffix-form, and ask if the meaning we ascribe to these
two forms can account for all their uses. A very fine model, by the help of
which we can elucitade this question, is the one of Grice where we
scrupulously can distinguish between what is "semantic meaning" and
"conversational pragmatic implicature". The principle of the model is:
"Semantic meanings may not be canceled without contradiction or reinforced
without redundancy."  If WEQATAL semantically is a modal form, this must be
evident in all its uses.  As I have said several times before, I claim it
is possible to account for all the uses of Hebrew verbs on the basis of
Hebrew having two conjugations and not four.


Regards
Rolf

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo



>Rolf,
>You've given me plenty to chew on here, and it will likely take all
>day to examine your examples.  Just a couple of comments:
>
>[snip]
>> However, to ascribe a semantic (uncancellable) property "modality" to
>> WEQATAL is highly problematic. At least two points must be cleared up
>> before one can do that:
>>
>> (1) One has to demonstrate that there is a difference between WEQATAL  and
>> WE+QATAL used with past meaning. This has never been done and is an
>> interesting challenge. In my view there is no difference.
>
>I'd like to hear Galia's take on this.  Waltke-O'Connor, following
>Moran, suggest that weqatal originated as an apodosis
>construction and say flatly that this idea "shines through almost all
>of its uses in Biblical Hebrew" (p.525).  They cover what they call
>"copulative WAW + Suffix Conjugation" beginning on p.540 and
>there do seem to be differences, so I find your statement that "this
>has never been done" curious.
>
>> (2) One has to find clear criteria which can differentiate between future
>> meaning and modality. This is difficult, and it seems that a modal analysis
>> of WEQATAL is somewhat selfserving, because most verbs with future meaning
>> can also, if this is our belief, be interpreted as modals.
>
>On the subject of future as modal, I refer you to Galia's book
>chapter 4.  It seems to me that she (and those she cites) has
>made her case for this idea.  If, as seems to be the case, "future
>meaning" is a subset of "modality" then we don't need these
>differentiating criteria.  The evidence she presents is largely from
>English before diving into Hebrew.  Note especially p. 120-121.
>
>[snip - gotta go spend some time in the passages cited]
>
>Dave Washburn
>http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
>A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.
>
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