Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT sil.org]

Yes, you've got my point! I am beginning to think that QATAL 
corresponds pretty well to the perfect aspect in English etc, i.e. to 
any one of present perfect, past perfect and future perfect depending 
on the reference time in the context. I have just been working on 
Psalm 119 and find that the verb forms in it fit very well with this 
idea, even in this poetic text for which the normal rules of verb 
forms are not supposed to apply - if one understands the QATAL of 
roots like )HB to mean "have fallen in love" and so with a stative 
meaning "love". (Incidentally the roots $MR and NCR seem to work in 
this way too, and so need to be understood something like "have 
committed oneself to keeping", which fortunately works nicely in the 
target language I am working with). I suspect that in this way we can 
explain the otherwise strange idea of QATAL with future meaning. (I am 
not talking now about WEQATAL).

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re[5]: The form of weqatal
Author:  dwashbur AT nyx.net at internet
Date:    24/07/1999 11:19


Peter wrote in part:

> Similarly, W:LO)-NOWTAR can be understood with a past meaning. This is 
> an interesting one which ties up with Bryan's idea of QATAL being
> stative, a state arrived at as a result of a previous event. The 
> English idiom is actually similar. "No-one is left" appears to be
> present tense, but is actually perfect, for "left" is the passive past 
> participle of the verb "leave". Similarly "no-one will be left" also
> has a past element. If we look at the reference time, in a verse like 
> 2 Samuel 17:12, which is the time of the observation, the observers
> say that in the battle which is already past the attackers did not
> leave anyone alive, and so in that sense "no-one will be left" is past 
> relative to the reference time. This is basically the same argument as 
> with ):A$ER NIMCF) but slightly more subtle. These subtleties need to 
> be looked at carefully by those trying to understand the Hebrew verb
> system, and certainly not rejected as "example[s] of how people
> holding traditional viewpoints defend these with questionable means" 
> or as fighting "with tooth and nail".

If you mean "past from the POV of the battle already being seen as 
over" I agree.  In this case, I wonder if the English future perfect 
wouldn't be a better choice: "We will attack them wherever we will 
have found them", and "No one will have been left alive."

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

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