Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Galia,


Thank you for answering all my questions. I have started to read your book
again - and meditate on its details. While I have some differing
viewpoints, I appreciate your work as one on a high scholarly level, and I
see that your conclusions are well founded, given your assumptions. Below I
comment one of the points in your last post.


GH
>Dear Rolf,
>
>You wrote:
>
>>I agree that we cannot take for granted that there is no difference between
>>the different books of the Bible, as regards their language. But neither
>>can we take for granted that there *is* a difference affecting the temporal
>>or aspectual meaning of the verbs.
>
>       No, of course not. However, the morphology has changed, which may
>suggest that the verbal system had collapsed by the time of Ezra and
>Nehemiah (and this strong claim I heard from colleagues in Israel). The
>most prominent change is the form of <wayyiqtol>. In the First Temple books
>the form attached to the <waw> is similar to the jussive (some would say it
>is the jussive - but this is not relevant for the present discussion),
>while in the books of the Second Temple we find verbs where the form is
>similar to the cohortative.
>In any case, since there are many changes in other areas (not only
>vocabulary; Hurvitz shows how syntactic structures in Psalms are different
>>from the ones in the early books and identical or similar to structures in
>the later period, kncluding the Mishnah), one can suspect that this might
>have happened in the case of the verb system as well. So a study on the
>later books needs to be done, which will confirm or refute the hypothesis.
>I suspect that such study will confirm the hypothesis, as we see comments
>such as Ben-Hayim, and some evidence as in Saenz-Bandillos.

RF
Before such a study is undertaken one should figure out how different
assumptions will influence one's interpretation of the data. Most important
is the number of conjugations that are assumed. In most studies four
conjugations are assumed, and on this basis a few data is compatible with a
change of verb meaning. If just two conjugations are assumed, even this
limited number of data has no bearing on verb meaning.
At Qumran the rule is that we find YIQTOLs with COHORTATIVE  endings.
However, this is weak evidence for a semantic change of verbs, as can be
seen by the numbers below where we find the 119 WAYYIQTOLs with COHORTATIVE
endings in the biblical books.


                Total    Hits per
                 Hits   1000 words

        Genesis    5       0.16

         Exodus    2       0.08

      Leviticus    0       0.00

        Numbers    1       0.04

    Deuteronomy    3       0.13

         Joshua    1       0.06

         Judges    5       0.32

        1Samuel    1       0.05

        2Samuel    7       0.40

         1Kings    0       0.00

         2Kings    0       0.00

         Isaiah    0       0.00

       Jeremiah    2       0.06

        Ezekiel    5       0.17

          Hosea    0       0.00

           Joel    0       0.00

           Amos    0       0.00

        Obadiah    0       0.00

          Jonah    0       0.00

          Micah    0       0.00

          Nahum    0       0.00

       Habakkuk    0       0.00

      Zephaniah    0       0.00

         Haggai    0       0.00

      Zechariah    0       0.00

        Malachi    0       0.00

         Psalms   21       0.71

            Job    9       0.71

       Proverbs    0       0.00

           Ruth    1       0.48

           Song    1       0.50

   Ecclesiastes    1       0.22

   Lamentations    0       0.00

         Esther    0       0.00

         Daniel    9       0.90

           Ezra   17       2.82

       Nehemiah   28       3.27

    1Chronicles    0       0.00

    2Chronicles    0       0.00


M.F. Rooker in "Biblical Hebrew in Transition The Language of the Book of
Ezekiel", 1990, Sheffield: JSOT Press,(p 100-102) thought that he saw a
tendency in Late Biblical Hebrew to avoid the consecutive forms (but his
examples are few) /A two-component model will even nullify these few
examples/. R. Polzin in "Late Biblical Hebrew,1976, Missoula, Montana:
Scholars Press, ( p 58) wrote: "First of all, it cannot be established that
the imperfect consecutive did in fact decrease in usage at this time
/Ezra/Nehemjah/."

I have made a detailed comparison of all the 470 verses which are dublettes
or triplets. The results do not suggest a change in verbal meaning at the
time of Ezra/Nehemjah because the differences go back and forth without any
pattern. Just look at a list of paralells with Samuel/Kings (1) versus
Chronicles (2).

(1) QATAL - (2) WAYYIQTOL 10
(1) WAYYIQTOL -(2) (QATAL) 7
(1) WEQATAL - (2) WAYYIQTOL 2
(1) YIQTOL - (2) WAYYIQTOL 1
(1) WAYYIQTOL - (2) INFINITIVE 4
(1) YIQTOL - (2) QATAL 3
(1) QATAL - (2) YIQTOL 1
(1) WEYIQTOL - (2) WEQATAL 1
(1) YIQTOL - (2) PARTICIPLE 1
(1) WEYIQTOL - (2) WEQATAL 2
(1) YIQTOL - (2) IMPERATIVE 1
(1) IMPERATIVE - YIQTOL 2
(1) WAYYIQTOL FULL FORM - (2) WAYYIQTOL APOCOPATED 4
(1) WAYYIQTOL APOCOPATED - (2) WAYYIQTOL FULL FORM 1

Altogether I found 69 verbs with different forms in the doublettes and 8
instances where a verb is apocopated in one place and have the full form in
the doublette.
My impression regarding the verbal system is that differences do not occur
in a particular pattern  suggesting a change of meaning, but most
differences are unsystematic, they are a matter of style or pragmatics.
Therefore I will be happy if you keep me updated with new results of the
diachronic studies of Israeli scholars.



Regards
Rolf


Rolf Furuli
University of OSLO