Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT sil.org]

Dear Joe,

Thank you for your Greek examples. I had also thought that (NT) Greek 
did something similar to what I am saying for Hebrew, but could not 
confirm it so I shut my mouth on that one before I put my foot in it 
again! I can now see that this is clearest with participles.

Russian also does something very similar with its gerunds (which are 
closely analogous to Greek adverbial participles). Quotes from "A 
Comprehensive Russian Grammar" by Terence Wade (Blackwell 1992) 
section 377-8: "The imperfective gerund denotes an action which is 
simultaneous to the action of the main verb. Either the two actions 
are simultaneous or one interrupts the other... The perfective gerund 
describes an action which is completed prior to the action denoted by 
the main verb... The perfective gerund may also denote a state 
resulting from the completion of an action... The verb in the main 
clause may be in any tense and either aspect."

Indeed the same applies even in English with this type of 
construction:

He sat reading the newspaper.
He is sitting reading the newspaper.
He will sit reading the newspaper.

He stood up, having read the newspaper.
He is standing up, having read the newspaper.
He will stand up, having read the newspaper.

The choice between "reading" and "having read" is determined by the 
temporal relationship between the two events and not the time relative 
to the deictic point. I would surmise that this is something common to 
Indo-European languages. Something rather similar happens in Turkic 
languages, but there are subtle differences as one would expect in a 
different language family.

The difference in Hebrew is that the same sort of thing happens also 
with "finite" verbs. But then we should not expect the same 
distinction between finite and non-finite verbs to hold across 
different language families.

Peter Kirk