Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Paul,
> 
> > If this is normal Hebrew for this sort of
> > > recounting of events, then how can anything be read into Joab's use
> of the
> > > verb forms?
> >
> > Precisely the point!  Why do you want to read anything into it?  As
> > someone wrote quite a while back, absence of the wayyiqtol is
> > much more significant than presence of it.  It's the simple form, like
> > the old commercial used to give for examples of the simple
> > declarative sentence: "Headaches hurt.  Aspirin cures headaches.
> > Brand X is pure aspirin."  What would you read into these verbs?
> > And why?  If you read anything into them, you're putting something
> > there that the author didn't.  Thus it is with the wayyiqtol: it's the
> > simple declarative, and if you read something into it, you're putting
> > something there that the writer didn't.
> 
> I know that you don't approach the text at the discourse level, but am I
> misreading you when you seem to be positing that the Hebrew would
> present the three sentences about headaches and aspirin as wayyiqtol?  I
> would be interested to see what text and resultant translation you base
> that on.

Either wayyiqtol or weqatal, depending on modality.  Actually, 
since they are more or less generic/habituals, they would probably 
be weqatal.

> Now if, on reflection, you, like me, come to the point where you doubt
> that the Hebrew would have used wayyiqtols to express these simple
> English declarative sentences, then you need to ask yourself, "Are there
> more than one pattern for 'simple declarative sentences' in the Hebrew?"
> If there are, are there special contexts in which one tends to be used
> and not another?  Would that not imply then that there is *some*
> additional information beyond the simple declarative that is being
> carried by the verbform, if only an indication of the context?  If there
> are not more than one "simple declarative" pattern, then is the
> wayyiqtol (and not the verbless clause or weqatal or weyiqtol or
> whatever) really that pattern?  If it is not, then it must be something
> more than "simple declarative," meaning that there is additional
> information there.

I haven't done verbless clauses yet.  However, I see a basic 
opposition between indicative and modal, where the "simple" 
clause (i.e. non-dependent, non-subordinate, non-conditional, non-
appositional etc. etc. etc.) is expressed by wayyiqtol in the 
indicative and weqatal in the modal.  The remarkable thing about 
this approach so far is that it provides a unified, syntactically 
cohesive view that seems to pretty well cover usage in the Hebrew 
Bible.  I haven't come across a counter-example yet.  That's not to 
say I won't, but so far...

> I may not agree with all that Matthew is proposing here with his
> musings, but I personally feel that asking the purpose for the selection
> of a verbform is within line.  I know you have come to the point in your
> examination where you reject the idea that wayyiqtols carry some concept
> of sequence, but some of the rest of us might state with the same
> conviction as you: if you flatly refuse to see any element of sequence
> in the wayyiqtol, you are not reading everything in the form that the
> writer expected the reader to see.  If you have matured in this point
> beyond us, good, and perhaps you will allow us to examine and grow so we
> can be at that point with you.  But, in case you are way off track in
> this one area, perhaps you can point out the superiority of your
> position with a bit less of an attack and a bit more of the explanation
> why the examination of the text based on clause level possibilities is
> *the* way to go.

First, I had no idea I was "attacking" anything or anybody.  I 
certainly didn't intend to.  Second, I don't consider myself to have 
"matured beyond" anything or anybody.  Such terms leave a bad 
taste in my mouth because they smack of arrogance on my part, 
and I surely don't intend that either.  I do reject sequence as an 
inherent feature of the wayyiqtol (and I'm far from the only one), 
largely because there are far too many counter-examples in the 
corpus that we have.  Even if one redefines sequence as Hatav did 
to include the first element in a series, there are too many 
examples such as the one before us that don't fit any definition of 
sequence that I've come across.  My paper uses examples from 
Judges 12.  An earlier paper of mine in Trinity Journal, dealing with 
the Josiah story, points out numerous examples where a wayyiqtol 
begins a new idea (at that time I was using Andersen's approach 
and hadn't developed this one yet).  

I don't claim to have "matured" (fact is, in most areas of life, I 
refuse to do such things ;-) beyond anything.  This is an approach 
that makes sense to me, seems to fit the data and seems to have 
a much smaller number of "problem" passages than approaches 
based on sequence, aspect, or tense.  Keep in mind that the idea 
of the Hebrew tenses as "aspects" rather than "tenses" around the 
time of Driver was a total paradigm shift.  My suggestion is that it's 
time for another paradigm shift, a whole different way of looking at 
things using a better linguistic model and finding an approach that 
gives a better account of the existing evidence in a more unified 
manner.  My approach seeks to do just that.  YMMV.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"No good deed goes unpunished."