Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Hello all,

To my understanding, BIblical Hebrew's conjuction (waw) connotes when
attached to a verb a conjunction, a time order, and time reversal. 
That is, a sentence that begins with "waw-verb ..." implies that the
action happened after what had been told in the previous verses had
completed, and also that the verb, if in future, refers to the past,
and if in past, it refers to the future.  In various places in late
books, we find that this waw is used without this time reversal
property.  For example, in the end of Esther 9:20-, we have:
wayyiktob, wayyi$lax, w:qibbel, w:hippil, w:talu.  Now in this
particular portion of verses we have what seems to be past tense but
the grammatical rules of analyzing this past tense shift in the
middle.  This could be explained as part of the heavy Aramaic
influence on the book of Esther, coupled with an attempt to write in
ancient Hebrew when Hebrew was already losing this construct.

However, I have noticed that "slips" like this happen in places where
that is less to be expected.  For examples, I Kings 4:7 "w:kilklu" is
apparently a future verb, although it's context is decidedly
historical and past tense.  Particularly, this verse happens in a
section which appears to be in debate as to whether it is "Solomonic"
or not.  In any case, it seems that this verse cannot be dated to the
exilic period, so it seems odd to find a future tense here when one
would expect past tense.  Even arguing that a "y" has fallen by
accident from the text, would seem odd, since by the time it could
have happened, there must have been many copies of Kings and so the
odds that this accidental slip would survive are low.  Oddly, no one
thus far in the various few articles I have read on this has paid any
attention to this slip.  Perhaps I am misreading.

I was wondering whether there was any systematic study of "slips" like
this and of the use and misuse of the waw- with verbs in the Bible. 
Or, if not that, a "concordance" of grammatical structures whereby one
could look up how common is the use of waw to denote past tense verbs
and how often it is used for future tense verbs.  This could give some
hint as to how uncommon the above verb is in Kings as opposed to
Esther.  Any help would be welcome :-)