Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Yitzhak,

You ask for a systematic study, and I would like to refer to my doctoral 
dissertation "A New Understanding of the Verbal System of Classical 
Hebrew An Attampt to Distinguish between Pragmatic and Semantic Factors" 
(430 pages) which will be submitted to the University of Oslo this week.

The work has taken ten years, and it contains an analysis of tense and 
modality, and to a certain extent of discourse functions, of all the 
79,974 finite and infinite verbs in the Tanakh, the DSS, Ben Sira, and 
the Inscriptions.  The conclusion is that what you call "slips" are the 
real things, and the claims of modern textbooks regarding  the power of 
WAW to make time reversals are wrong.

The basic flaw in modern studies of Hebrew grammar is the total lack of 
distinction between semantic meaning (uncancellable meaning that never 
can change under any circumstances) and conversational pragmatic 
implicature (cancellable meaning dependent upon the context).  What we 
find in textbooks and monographs are descriptions of *uses* and 
*functions* of verbs - which is a fine endeavor, of course - but we do 
not find discussions of the *meaning* of each form.  This means that 
what is stressed is quantity but not quality.

For example, 78.4 percent of the WAYYIQTOLs have long (not apocopated) 
forms. A quantity assessment would be that because of this high 
percentage we must conclude that the base of the WAYYIQTOL is a long 
YIQTOL.  But this would not be a good approach, because these 78,4 
percent, for morphological and phonological reasons, simply cannot be 
short.  Therefore, we must do a quality study of the other 21.6 per cent 
of the forms. (After studying these, however, it turns out that there is 
no real evidence that the base of WAYYIQTOL is a short YIQTOL.)

Exactly the same is true with the 93.1 percent of the WAYYIQTOLs that 
have past reference.  A quantity assessment has lead to conclusions that 
WAYYIQTOL is past tense or the perfective aspect.  However, these 93,1 
simply cannot be anything but past, because they occur in narratives 
where verb forms per definition must have past reference. Therefore, in 
order to find the semantic meaning of the WAYYIQTOL, we must do a 
quality study of the 998 examples with non-past reference.

After having made quality studies of these 998 WAYYIQTOLs with non-past 
reference, of the 2,505 QATALs with present and the 965 with future 
reference, and of the 1,022 YIQTOLs with past and the 5 with pre-past 
reference (only a few being of the socalled "durative past"), and 
looking at the verbal systems of the cognate languages, the following 
very radical conclusions are drawn:

1) There is no real evidence that the antecedent of the WAYYIQTOL is an 
old short preterit.
    (YAQTUL  in Ugaritic and Canaanite and IPRUS in AKKADIAN can refer 
to past present and future, and it has never been established that the 
short form in any of the cognate languages represent past tense 
(grammaticalized location in time).  No link between the short form in 
these old languages and WAYYIQTOL is found.

2) While we in the Tanakh see eveidence for different stages in Hebrew 
(OBH, SBH, LBH, Qumran Hebrew etc), Aramaic influence, a different uses 
of words, and different vocabularies etc., the evidence suggests that 
the *semantic meaning*  of finite and infinite verbs did not change from 
the oldest to the youngest books.

3) The artificial difference between prose and poetry, as far as 
semantic meaning is concerned, has never been substantitated.  In poetry 
we find differences in style and in the use of linguistic forms, but a 
QATAL or a YIQTOL has the same meaning in prose as in poetry.

4) Classical Hebrew does not have tenses.

5) Classical Hebrew does not have aspects in the English sense of the 
word, with the opposition  "incomplete/complete(d).  Any Hebrew finite 
and infinite form can signal incomplete (unbounded) and completed 
(bounded) action.

6) THE MAIN CONCLUSION:  YIQTOL, WAYYIQTOL, and WEYIQTOL represent the 
imperfective aspect (defined slightly differently compared with its 
English counterpart), and QATAL and WEQATAL represent the perfective aspect.

Back to your question: The WAY(Y)-  and the WE- prefixes represent the 
conjunction WAW which has no semantic meaning and which has no semantic 
force, but the WAW is a powerful syntactic tool.  The conjunction WAW is 
what drives the narrative forward and makes the end of each consecutive 
event visible and not the verb form to which it is attached or the 
conjugation of this verb form.


Best regards

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo






Yitzhak Sapir wrote:

> 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 :-)
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