Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - RE: My understanding of Gen 1:1-3

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
  • To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: RE: My understanding of Gen 1:1-3
  • Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 09:17:51 -0600


[snip]
> Several books of the Hebrew Bible (but not Genesis) start with WAYYIQTOL
> verbs. But they are part of an ongoing narrative history of Israel and
> start with the next significant event in that history. A friend of mine
> has written a paper, which may be published shortly, on how the books of
> the Bible fit together in a framework using such verb forms and other
> discourse markers. Niccacci wrote something similar a few years ago, in
> Italian I think but that shouldn't be a problem for you.
>
Peter, I tend to agree with you about Gen 1:1-2 as you know, but I'm
afraid Ian has you on the matter of the WAYYIQTOL. Your
explanation of books that begin with this form is weak at best,
contrived at worst and tends to ignore the whole question of sources
(which I'm not going to get into). The fact is that Niccacci, Hatav
and other recent writers on the topic suffer from a case of circular
reasoning: we "know" that the WAYYIQTOL denotes sequence,
therefore we approach texts that are simple narrative in order to
prove it, and we know they're simple narrative because they use the
WAYYIQTOL and it's a sequential form. QED.

Of the recent works on the topic, I find Galia Hatav's the most
exciting because of her work on the question of modality. At the
same time, questions of sequentiality and syntax are relegated to
lists of statistics and selected, dare I say, obvious, examples that
seem (probably unconciously) to have been selected somewhat ad
hoc. The questions I raised some 10 years ago have yet to be
answered, particularly wrt to the extended passage in Judges that I
presented. The latter part of Judges 12 has several "chains" of
WAYYIQTOL that cannot possibly be "sequential," in terms of time
or "logical consequence" or any of the other common extensions of
the term. Ian mentioned the beginning of Ezekiel; Jonah 1:1 is
likewise a problem, and I haven't seen any of the recent treatments
deal with any of this.

The simple fact is that the WAYYIQTOL is not a "sequential" form
and never was. Even F. I. Andersen, in "The Sentence in Biblical
Hebrew," while trying to preserve the idea of sequentiality, had to
admit that in many, many cases the form begins a new section of
narrative. These kinds of exegetical back-flips are unnecessary
unless one has some major stake in preserving the idea of inherent
sequentiality. If one does, one needs to get over it, to put it bluntly.

Then again, I've noticed that in terms of linguistic theory, biblical
studies tends to take about 50 years to catch up to everyone else,
so perhaps my hypothesis only has 40 years to go!

;-) (That last part was a joke, btw)
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page