Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Alviero Niccacci <sbfnet AT netvision.net.il>]

Dear Galia Hatav,

Thanks for caring to comment on my post. See my reply below.

On  30/12/99 (Re: <wayyiqtol> again (G.Hatav)) Galia Hatav wrote:

1) < ... >
> If I am not mistaken, by "tense" you mean the main temporal
> construction in a certain text. Am I right? In that case, is it the case
> that if a verb form is the main construction in text A but not in text B,
> that form is a tense only with respect to text A?  Your discussion on
> <qatal> seems to suggest just that. That means that the forms change their
> properties (from being tenses to not being tenses) from one text to the
other, which I believe is not good, theoretically speaking.

1) (AN) No no no, far from that. I must have expressed myself in a 
terrible way. Sorry. Qatal is the tense in direct speech when it 
starts the mainline of an oral narrative--in EVERY TEXT;  x-yiqtol is 
the future tense when it announces future plans or events--in EVERY 
TEXT; the same for jussive & cohortative yiqtol, and imperative; 
similarly the nonverbal sentence (with or without participle) is the 
present tense when it represents the mainline of an exposition--in 
EVERY TEXT.

2) < ...>
> What does it mean that <qatal> is not a tense in the FULL sense? Is
> it possible to be tense only in part? What do you call <qatal> in the
> narrative? What is its property?

2) (AN) It means that qatal in historical narrative is used for 
background information (= circumstance, comment, or the like) not for 
mainline, or foreground (= as a simple past tense).

3) < ... >
> Why do you see <qatal> as the main tense if it only OPENS
> direct speech (DS)?  If we have a narrative within DS, as in 2Sam 1:6-11,
> except for the first clause, all the clauses will be in <wayyiqtol> (just
> like in regular narrative). Then why go according to one clause instead of
> most of the clauses in determining the main verb form in DS?

3) (AN) Simply because no oral narrative begins with wayyiqtol, but 
wayyiqtol is used as a continuation form in both oral and historical 
narrative. This may be due to the fact that wayyiqtol is the only 
verbform available in BH for the mainline of communication with 
reference to the past. In other words, BH does not possess 
distinctive verbforms for oral narrative versus historical narrative 
as, e.g., Neo-Latin languages do, except for the beginning--i.e. 
qatal, or x-qatal, versus wayyiqtol. The examples I provided in a 
previous post prove exactly that.

4)
> >Outside historical narrative, i.e. both in prose direct
> >speech and in poetry, wayyiqtol is only used as a continuation form,
> > i.e. it continues a verbform that is not a wayyiqtol and shares its
> >status.
>
>         Not true. This is what Driver implicitely suggested. One of the
> main arguments Bauer had against Driver's theory is that eleven books in
> the Bible start with a <wayyiqtol> verb. In checking beginning of segments
> (relying on the Jewish division of the text, namely into PARASHOT PTUXOT
> and PARASHOT STUMOT, I found many examples where a <wayyiqtol> clause opens
> a segment and doe not continue another verb form.

4) Sorry, this is undoubtedly true if it is true that no oral 
narrative begins with wayyiqtol. -- The fact that eleven book begin 
with wayyiqtol is interesting. I studied this phenomenon five years 
ago in a paper that, if I amo not mistaken, I referred to already in 
this forum--it was published in Italian in _Rivista Biblica_ 43 
(1995) 9-29, *Organizzazione canonica della Bibbia Ebraica. Tra 
sintassi e retorica.* I concentrated in the analysis of the beginning 
and end of the Biblical books. My criterion was that wayyiqtol 
indicates textual connection while other verbforms and constructions 
indicate disconnection. The result is that there appears a conscious 
*canonical* organization of the Biblical books. Specifically, a large 
narrative cycle emerges extending from the origins through the exile. 
It comprises not only the Pentateuch but also Joshua, Judges, Samuel, 
and Kings. The books of other collections are generally separate one 
from the other with a few exceptions. Among the Prophets, Ezekiel and 
Jonah are linked to the narrative cycle Genesis - 2Kings and to 
Obadian, respectively. Among the writings, Ruth is linked to Judges 
and Esther to Ezra-Nehemiah. A sophisticated and coherent editorial 
design for the whole Hebrew Bible emerges form the analysis. The 
design postulates a rather limited period for the organization of the 
whole Hebrew Bible, probably dating much earlier than usually 
thought. In my research I made use of two important studies--R. 
Beckwith, _The Old Testamnt Canon of the New Testament Church..._, 
and D.N. Freedman, _The Unity of the Hebrew Bible.

5) < ... >
> Actually they are full tenses, i.e.
> >they encode a FIX time reference, when they convey mainline of
> > communication;
>
> Again, you may mean something different by "tense" than
> past-present-future, in which case I might agree (depending on what you
> mean).

5) (AN) Again, no. By tense I mean a fix reference in time--past, 
present, and future.  English nicely distinguishes between 
chronological time and grammatical tense. What we have in a text is 
tense, not time. Tense and time may coincide or diverge. It is the 
author who decides, and the verbforms he uses reflect his decisions. 
IMO it is not correct to invoke the time of the event in order to 
establish the value of the verbforms. In other words, in the text we 
read the way the speaker/writer organized his information in a 
structured way--according to HIS time, irrespective of the 
chronological time. The time of the EVENTS themselves remains outside 
the tex and we have to recover it by interpretation. That is why I am 
always unease when one brings into the discussion of the verbal 
system the category of event-time.

        <...>

A blessed New Year 2000.
Alviero Niccacci


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