Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Rolf, 
> 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.

Agreed.

> 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.

They didn't know these things in any formal sense, of course, but 
they instinctively understood relationships between events and 
times, so the fact that they didn't have any formal methodology for 
describing them hardly seems relevant.  Those notations and terms 
are nothing more than ways of formalizing the linguistic 
conventions  that people use(d).  I don't really see where this gets 
us anywhere.

> 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, 

Examples?

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 disagree that wayyiqtol uses a "shortened, modal, form of the 
verb."  As I have explained elsewhere, the shortening in the 
wayyiqtol seems to be a result of phonological conditioning, not 
some outgrowth of the two-prefix-conjugation hypothesis (which I 
reject).

> 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.

Again, the best I can do is refer you to Waltke-O'Connor.  What 
sort of demonstration would be required to change your mind, and 
how much evidence would be required?

> 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.

I agree as far as this goes.  I believe there are distinct syntactic 
differences between yiqtol and weqatal, for example.  They are 
used in modal contexts, but they differ in the matter of syntactic 
connections with what precedes, just as wayyiqtol and qatal do.  I 
don't see them as synonymous, but I do see them as the two 
options for a particular context (indicative for wayyiqtol/qatal and 
modal for yiqtol/weqatal) depending on what kind of syntactic 
connection, if any, the writer/speaker wanted.  This is why I 
hammer away at the distinction and separation between syntax 
and semantics.

> 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.

So far, the examples of weqatal without a modal meaning that I 
have seen are considerably less than satisfying.  So I haven't seen 
evidence yet that modality is not evident in all its uses.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.