Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT sil.org]

Your first question is indeed a good one. Can the niphal of LXM mean 
"enter battle"? Well, it is hard to be sure, but there are several 
cases which can at least be plausibly interpreted in this way. For 
example:

Exo 17:8 The battle was not over before verse 9!
Num 21:1 Taking captives was during the battle not after it.
Jos 10:5 The battle continues...
Jos 10:29-38 5 times, this is the start of the battle

etc etc. Of course these are dependent on my understanding of 
wayyiqtol as normally sequential and perfective. But I think you need 
to justify clearly an understanding of the wayyiqtols of Jos 10:29-30 
as anything other than a sequence of events, which involves taking 
"wayyillaxem" as "entered battle". So I don't think my translation can 
really be called "ad hoc".

As for my point 2, if Uriah was one of those who fell, he died after 
he fell. I agree that usually in such contexts NPL implies death, but 
in 2 Samuel 1:4, 2:23 NPL and MWT are used in sequence for death. 1:4 
is actually quite parallel with 11:17 but with some differences. There 
may be a change of subject in 11:17, but if so the new subject is a 
subset of the old one and so my interpretation is not invalidated, I 
think.

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re[3]: Perfectivity of wayyiqtols
Author:  <dwashbur AT nyx.net> at Internet
Date:    20/10/1999 09:54


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.

<snip>