Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan-buth <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

RE:     vayyiqtol and Greek aspect

Rolf wrote:
>I accept the conclusions of Porter and
>Broman Olsen that Aorist does not code for past tense, only for the
>perfective aspect.

That is too bad. (Though irrelevant to vayyiqtol=perfective since all admit
aorist is perfective.)
Greek people have trouble buying such an absolutely tenseless thesis
because it doesn't explain that indicative little augment that
differentiates the imperfect PAST from the PRESENT and that is stuck on
those indicative aorist pasts. Porter claims that revolutionary new ideas
receive a bad press. So do wrong ideas. Does that mean that something wrong
must be accepted as revolutionary and right? No. Stan is a prodigous
scholar whose contributions and work can already be appreciated, but his
views on the augment and indicative Greek tenses are best left behind. Cf.
both Buist Fanning and Moises Silvas reviews of several years ago in a
collected volume, Carson, ed? (it was suggested that Porter's fixation on
finding one, 'perfectly consistent' description of meaning is
counterintuitive to the way real languages work and led him to turn Greek
indicative on its head. Pure subjectivity is also unfalsifiable, so a
mistaken proponent can sit in their tower until they want to smell the
roses. Better is to interact with a resurrected living situation that
starts to go against internal predictions.) But we can leave inner-Greek
discussions, since the aorist as perfective is clear.

And for Hebrew it is clear that the LXX viewed the vayyiqtol as PERFECTIVE.

Where imperfective yiqtol/veqatal were used, e.g. Gn 2.6, 29.2-3, then
Greek imperfective is used. Yet immediately following vayyiqtol-s are
correctly put into aorist at 2.7 and 29.4.
Even more importantly, though, are the multiples of PERFECTIVE, PERFECTIVE,
PERFECTIVE. There are too many Greek aorist past tense verbs in the LXX to
sound like good Greek. Some books are absolutely frightful, but even
Genesis has much too heavy a style for natural Greek. What was causing this
heightened Greek PERFECTIVENESS? Good old vayyiqtol. 

Rolf would counter this massive weight with the LXX Daniel, a book with
"two" Greek translations, textual problems and idiosyncratic Aramaic? (See
note in Aramaic email.) This is again holding up the "marginal" and "fuzzy"
and claiming that therefore "water flows uphill and downhill". 

In sum, the Greek LXX, the intertestamental Aramaic literature, the
post-second temple Aramaic literature, inner-biblical Hebrew patterns of
contrast and complementation, for that matter even tannaitic rabbinic
testimony in midrashim (and they even wrote in BH on very rare occasions,
cf. Kiddushin 66), ALL point to the perfectivity of vayyiqtol. 

It's an ancient, loud chorus. 
NB: an underdifferentiated verbal system, by its very nature, will generate
a relatively large quantity of 'marginalia'. But that is no excuse for
being deaf to the chorus. 

ERRWSO
RAndall Buth
ps: attached is a lower ascii keyboard Hebrew drogulin font for reading the
file attached to the Aramaic email.