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  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Use and Misuse of Waw in Verb Tenses
  • Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:44:10 +0200

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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