Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Moon-Ryul Jung" <moon AT sogang.ac.kr>]

Ian, 
thank you so much for asking this question. I also raised this
question in the midst of this thread, but got no feedback. 

I read the following arguments:
(1) RESHIT in BERESHIT in Gen 1.1 is in the construct form, 
    because all the other occurrences of BERESHIT are in 
    the construct form, being qualified by some absolute forms. 
(2) So, BERESHIT in Gen 1.1. should be qualified by something absolute.
    But here there is no noun phrase to qualify BERESHIT. So, the clause 
    followed by BERESHIT should play the role of the qualifying absolute
    noun. 

To this I would like to say:
(1) RESHIT in MERESHIT Isa 46.10 should be considered to be in the
    absolute state. 
   [ declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things 
     not yet done, saying, "My purpose shall stand, and I will fulfill
      my intention," ]
    The form RESHIT itself does not indicate that it is in the absolute.
(2) So, if one wants to construe Gen 1.1 so that BERESHIT is qualified by
   the following QATAL clause, it should be done on grounds other than 
   BERESHIT is in the construct state.
(3) Ian, you did a good job of pointing to many BYOM + finite clause,
    where YOM is qualified by the finite clause. This can be explained 
     by two hypotheses:
     (i) [H1] A noun [in the absolute state] can be qualified by a finite
clause
         WITHOUT the relative pronouns such as SH and ASHER, if necessary.
         Then the relative pronouns can be omitted in BH as in English.
     (ii) [H2] BYOM is a fixed expression which can be used as a temporal
          conjunction like KY. This can be confirmed if we can show that 
          only time expressions can be qualified by finite clauses without
          the relative pronoun, as you indicated. 
(4) In either hypothesis, BYOM can be qualified by more than one clauses.
    There are nothing that would prohibit such rules. It should be one of
the
    universals in human languages. But as far as I observe the debate
between
    Ian and Peter, the problem is not whether BYOM can be qualified by
more
    than one clauses. It is whether two clauses qualifying BYOM are
COORDINATED
    clauses or SEQUENTIAL clauses.  For all the BYOM clause debate between
you
    and Peter, I tend to agree with Peter, because for now I adopted
    the grammar of Hatav and Niccacci. They do not analyize  WAYYIQTOL
into
    W + IQTOL, but consider WAYYIQTOL as a "tense" on its own. They
consider
    WAYYIQTOL basically sequential in the sense that it introduces a new
event
    in the narrative relative to the current reference time. 

(5) Now, I would like to put a conjecture as follows:
   WAYYIQTOL  cannot be used when there is no reference time to refer to.
   [Peter seems  to accept it, while you reject it.] If this hypothesis 
   is right, in sentences of the form WAYHI + BYOM + QATAL/QOTEL/Inf +   
   WAYYIQTOL, QATAL/QOTEL/Inf and WAYYIQTOL cannot be coordinated and 
    thus cannot both qualify YOM, 
    because QATAL/QOTEL/Inf is used to introduce the reference time, 
    and WAYYIQTOL introduces a new event relative to the introduced
     reference time.
    

Moon 
Moon R. Jung
Sogang Univ, Seoul, Korea




    from           

(2) 
 
 How do people see the relationship between b-nouns 
> and the clauses they govern? I have heard people 
> talking of constructs but as I understood, such a 
> relationship is really one of noun to noun, yet it 
> is clear from some of the examples that I have put 
> forward that this is clearly not the case as we are 
> dealing with complete clauses (though this seems 
> invariably with time phrases and never with other 
> qualified phrases). So, do you see these clauses as 
> governed just like a construct relationship or are 
> these a different type of relationship? I simply 
> don't know, have no position, and would like to 
> know what people think.
> 
> 
> Ian