Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Tony Costa" <tmcos AT rogers.com>]

Dear friends, can someone clarify whether the preterite in biblical Hebrew 
functions in the same was the aorist tense functions in biblical Greek? The 
aorist functions as the simple passive or as the undefined past. Thank you.

Tony Costa
>From peterkirk AT qaya.org  Wed May 26 14:50:28 2004
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Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 11:50:26 -0700
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Vav consecutive Gen 1:3
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On 26/05/2004 11:35, furuli AT online.no wrote:

>
> Dear Geroge,
>
> By "preterite," do you mean "grqmmaticalized past tense," i.e. that
> the WAYYIQTOL is uncancellable past tense in any context, ...


Do such tenses exist in any language? Or is this merely a theoretical
construct?

> ... just as English "went" and "walked"? ...


These are not uncancellably past. In "If I walked down the road now, I
would meet my neighbours in their garden", "walked" is not past, because
its past meaning is cancelled by the conditional construction. The same
is true in "When my friend comes tomorrow, he will complain that he
walked a long way, but I did tell him I would pick up him up at the
station", because the past meaning is cancelled by its subordination to
a future verb. And most languages are more flexible than English, not
less, in their use of verb tenses.

> ... If so, is it possible to differentiate between "past tense" and
> "past reference," or are all verbs with past reference preterites? ...


I would suggest that all verb forms which indicate past time when used
in unmarked contexts are past tenses or preterites. But most if not all
of these verb forms can also be used with non-past reference in marked
constructions, for example as relative past within a future. The details
vary from language to language.

The exceptional cases of non-past WAYYIQTOL etc which you have listed
are necessarily in marked constructions, because if there were not some
kind of marking you would have no way of identifying them as non-past.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/