Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Galia Hatav wrote:

>
>Last Spring I suggested that <wayyiqtol> is composed of three elements:
><w>, <ay> and <yiqtol>. The form of <yiqtol> I analyzed in my book as modal
>in the sense of modal logic, i.e., a clause with a verb in this form
>quantifies over possible worlds.  The morpheme <ay>, I suggested last
>spring, functions to anchor the situation to the Actual World. It does the
>same job as a definite article does for noun phrases. Here is the example I
>gave:
>
>       1. a. Students work hard.
>          b. The students work hard.
>
>In (1a) the NP "students" refers to ANY person who happens to be a student
>(including those people who were students in the past or will be in the
>future). In other words, there is a universal quantifier ranging over all
>the members of the set. In (1b) the article THE picks a group of
>individuals.
>The question is, whether the definite article for NPs is only an analogy to
>the <ay> in <wayyiqtol>, or as you (and other people) suggested, that
>actually the <ay> is a derivation of the definite article.
>


Dear Galia,


While I am sceptical about the claim that the definite article was
incorporated into a verb form, I am open for arguments. If you have written
anything about it, I will be happy to consider it. Allow me, however, to
express my present views reagarding this question.

As a matter of fact, there is no indication that the WAW prefixed to
YIQTOLs is anything but a conjunction before the Masoretes pointed the
text. It is also quite clear that the Masoretes wanted to distinguish
between WAYYIQTOL  and WEYIQTOL,but the question is: What was the basis for
this distinction? Let us look at example (1):

(1) 2Kings 9:17 In Jezreel, the sentinel standing on the tower spied the
company of Jehu arriving, and said (WAYYIQTOL), "I see a company." Joram
said, "Take a horseman; send him to meet them, and let him say (WEYIQTOL),
'Is it peace?'"

When we consider this example, we should keep in mind that although we
speak about an -AY- element in WAYYIQTOL, this is only descriptive. There
is of course no such element existent, but the characteristic is
*gemination* in 3. person forms and *compensatory lengthening* in 1 person.
singualar. It is generally accepted that the Masoretes pointed their text
on the basis of the recitation they heard in the synagogue, and that they
were extremely careful not to add anything to the consonant text (and
probably not to what they heard as well).

Therefore, what did the Masoretes hear in the Synagogue? Evidence from
Josephus and Origen, and from the Masoretes themselves suggest that shewa
was generally pronounced by an "a"-sound just as patah, but shewa could
also be colored by other vowels. If the intention was to distinguish
between two different conjugations (WAYYIQTOL and WEYIQTOL) by help of the
vocalization, shewa versus patah were the worst possible choice, because of
their similarity. We therefore do not have any indication that the timbre
of shewa and patah in the two verbs of (1) was different. There is,
however, one factor that would distinguish the two, namely stress. If now
the Masoretes heard the two verbs being stressed differently, how would
that affect vocalization?

The WEYIQTOL has two open syllables and the last is closed. It has the
normal ultimate stress, and because the closed syllable is stressed, the
short patah is OK. The WAYYIQTOL, however, has penultimate stress, and this
would, according to the phonetic laws, demand a different vocalization.
Because of the stress, we either would have expected a pretonic qamets in
the first syllable or a patah together with gemination; a shewa in a
supposed open first open syllable before the stress, would not be expected.
This means, as far as I can see, that a combination of the hearing of
penultimate stress in the synagogue, and the phonetic laws applied by the
Masoretes (I leave alone those verbs that can be apocopated), can account
for all the differences between WAYYOMER  and W:YOMAR in (1). If this is
true, there need not be an extra element in addition to WAW  in any of the
WAYYIQTOLs with stable roots.

Let us look at the situation from another angle. If the definite article
was a part of WAYYIQTOL, that would corroborate with the fact that a patah
can signal the article and that gemination follows the article. However,
does the gemination of nouns preceded by the article have any semantic
meaning? Who will say that? It seems that this gemination only is
phonetically conditioned, and the same is true with the gemination after
the particle MH. So if I claim that the gemination of WAYYIQTOL can be
phonetically conditioned as well, this is not without examples. I suspect
that nobody would have looked for a semantic meaning in the gemination of
the WAYYIQTOLs if the *use* of this form was not so different from the use
of YIQTOL and WEYIQTOL. So the suggestion seems to be based on the
*understanding* of the form rather than on any phonetic or linguistic
evidence. (We should also keep in mind that the article probably is a
rather young phenomenon which would also make WAYYIQTOL an even younger
phenomenon.)

But what is the basis of the supposed difference in stress in the
Synagogues of Masoretic times. The more I work on the mapping of all the
finite verbs of the Bible, the more evident it becomes to me that there is
a very neat pattern in the use of the different forms and constructions.
For the most part we cannot explain *why* a particular form/construction is
used (e.g. QATAL-sentence-initial in direct speech, scarce in other genres;
WEQATAL with imperative force following an imperative; WEYIQTOL with
volitional and final meaning after imnperatives etc). All we can say is
that there are different patterns that help us understand the text.
Following the same line, it would not be unreasonable when two forms with
similar morhology but different use are found, to stress them differently.
Particularly when the text for the most part was read aloud, this would be
a help for the listeners. The penultimate stress of the WAYYIQTOLs would
from this point of view fit the more staccato narrative recitation, while
the normal ultimate stress would fit direct speech, future/modality better.
Just as pausal stress has no phonemic meaning, so the penultimate stress of
the WAYYIQTOLs need not have any phonmic meaning. The ultimate stress of
some WEQATALs could be explained the same way.


My suggestion, therefore, is very simple. In the unpointed texts (and in
the reading of them) before the Masoretes, there was no difference in the
stress of finite verbs with proclitic WAW. In our Christian era when Hebrew
gradually lost its position as a living spoken language and only few people
spoke it - in a world dominated by Aramaic and Arabic - to help those
listening to the recitation of the Hebrew text in the Synagogue, the stress
pattern we know was introduced. There was no grammatical reason for this,
only the intention to help the listeners to understand the text better. The
Masoretes followed this stress pattern with the consequences we know - also
without any grammatical intentions. However, when the need for a
systematization of Hebrew grammar arose from the 9th century onward, the
first Hebrew grammarians with a background in Arabic, Aramaic, Mishnaic
Hebrew and other languages, saw the need to squeese Hebrew into a model of
*tense*, and on this basis they interpreted this "stress" difference as
semantic, and the four-component model for verbs was borne. What earlier
only had been a help for listeners, now became a semantic distinction in
the verbal system.

It is quite ironic that the four parts of the model originally was
distinguished on the basis of *tense*. Later, in the days of S.R. Driver,
when tense was discarded and aspect was introduced, this was not made on
the basis of a new study of the verbs of the Bible, but the old basis was
used. That is, the four groups that was singled out on the basis of tense,
was still accepted, but now as an expression of aspect. And this is even
more strange when we realize that there is no one-to-one relationship
between tense and aspect. By way of conclusion I will say that when it is
possible to explain WAYYIQTOLs as YIQTOLs being used similarly with YIQTOLs
in Biblical Aramaic, there is no need to postulate and extra semantic
element in the gemination/compensatory lengthening of the WAYYIQTOLs






Regards

Rolf



Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo