Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Cees van Veelen" <ceesv AT veelen.hobby.nl>]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2000 06:35:02 -0700, Dave Washburn wrote:

>Cees van Veelen (not being familiar with your language, I'd be 
>interested in knowing how to pronounce your name),
Cees - like Americans say 'Case'
van - the 'a' sounds like the British say 'a' in the word 'after'
Veelen: the letters 'ee' as in Cees, the letters 'en' like the English
article 'an'

>> How is this construction to be evaluated? The only thing I can imagine
>> is that the chiastic word order and the shift from WAYYIQTOL to QATAL
>> is to create (or emphasize) a contrast: God called the light Day, _but_
>> the darkness He called Night.
>
>Yes!  And this is precisely what my approach to the verb forms 
>predicts.  There's a syntactic connection in the use of the qatal, 
>one of contrast enhanced by the chiastic structure (though on 
>chiasmus in general, I tend to follow F. I. Andersen's view that 
>chiasmus draws the two clauses together into a single 
>semantic/pragmatic unit and tighten their association with each 
>other - see the relevant sections in his "Sentence in Biblical 
>Hebrew").  The wayyiqtol signals a syntactically independent 
>thought that is not dependent or otherwise syntactically connected 
>with the preceding clause, and the qatal signals a syntactic 
>connection with the preceding clause - in this case, contrast.  

Yes, I understand your view. Before I wrote my original post I checked
a lot of translations - nowhere I found the contrast between the two
parts of the sentence, they all connect the first and the second part
with the word 'and' (or german or dutch equivalents).

>Excellent observation, and since I haven't seen your name in a post 
>before, welcome!

Thank you. (I have been reading a long time though)




Greetings,

Cees van Veelen, 
Amsterdam The Netherlands