Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Hi Peter,
> There are two points here:
> 
> 1. The sequence "wayyillachamu ... wayyapol": here, can we not 
> understand "wayyillachamu" as "started to battle", "entered battle"? 
> If not, why not?

How common is its usage in this way?  I would also have to ask 
whether this understanding has any basis other than a desire to 
preserve the idea of perfectivity in the wayyiqtol, i.e. is it a 
generalised approach or is it ad hoc?

> 2. The sequence "wayyapol ... wayyamot": logically, each person first 
> falls down then dies. I don't think we need to take this to mean that 
> first they all fell, then after the last one fell all died.

The problem is that there's a change of subject between them.  
Wayyippol has "some of the people" as its subject, where 
wayyamot is specifically limited to Uriah.  I think it's pretty clear 
that dying is included in the semantic range of wayyippol; first, it's 
a common usage of the term, and second, the explicit inclusion of 
"gam" in the next clause indicates that we should understand it to 
mean "Uriah was among those who died."

> With this analysis, no question of imperfectivity I think, all 
> wayyiqtols are perfective.

It would work except for the change of subject and the question of 
an ad hoc translation in order to preserve the perfectivity idea.

> (Actually, since the "doing battle" may have consisted of firing off 
> one volley of arrows (v.20), one could actually say that the doing 
> battle finished before the falling started, and then all fell before 
> the first one died, but I won't insist on that interpretation! ;-)

Um, the first clause of v.17 says explicitly that they came out of 
the city to fight.  v.20 speaks of a potential question from David 
about arrows from the wall, it doesn't say that's how Uriah and the 
others were killed.

> I wonder whether (given the disjunctive accent on "wayyamot") the 
> subject of "wayyamot" is in fact "some of the servants", and "gam 
> 'uriyyah" is a sort of afterthought (more technically, a right 
> detached or right dislocated element). So perhaps translate "some of 
> David's servants fell and died - Uriah the Hittite as well."

The accent is disjunctive, all right, but it comes right after the 
atnach on "David" so I'm not sure we can go this far.  The major 
disjunctive comes on the word before wayyamot, so that suggests 
to me that "gam Uriah" is in fact the subject.  Isn't it wonderful that 
accents are ambiguous enough to allow for such diverse 
interpretations?

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