Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Galia Hatav <ghatav AT aall.ufl.edu>]

Dear Rolf,

You wrote:

>I generally accept your demonstration of WAYYIQTOL as a R-building form in
>your corpus, but  I dispute that you can extrapolate this to the whole
>Bible corpus, and that this is an inherrent semantic property of WAYYIQTOL.
>I rather ascribe its R-building ability to the nature of the narrative
>itself (and the versatility of the conjunction waw). Only when you can
>demonstrate the universal R-building property of WAYYIQTOL in *all* the
>kinds of material found in the Bible, will you have a strong case for the
>R-building being the semantic meaning of WAYYIQTOL.

        Tow points. First, concerning the corpus. As I wrote to Bryan
Rocine, it has been demonstrated by Hebraists such as Ben-Hayim that in
dealing with BH, especially with the verb forms, one needs to distinguish
between the books from the First Temple period and the books from the
Second Temple period.  Just like we would not put into the same basket the
temporal systems of Mishnaic and Biblical Hebrew, we must not put into the
same basket the temporal systems of the First and the Second Temple
periods.  However, I do agree with you that limiting the corpus to
narratives may lead to wrong conclusions.  I chose narratives because most
of the time one can establish temporal relations between situations, based
on independent considerations such as causality. Relying on the text alone
might lead to circular arguments.  I agree that prophetic and other poetic
texts must be studied to demonstrate that <wayyiqtol> is, indeed, an
R-building form.  In order to do that, however, one must first study poetry
conventions in the Ancient East and mainly in BH. Unfortunately, I have not
done that, so I will stick to my conclusions based on narratives, knowing
that they still need to be examined in other genres (where they might be
proven to be  inadequate, of course).

Galia