Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>]

That's all scholasticism. Waw denotes the PT-FT tense shift. Later, a new
grammatical structure (based on imperative) replaced it for the future
tense, and wa- appeared as a symmetrical FT-PT shift instrument. Quite
often, translators twist the waw to comply with preconceived meaning,
creating these ideas of enigmatic and complex usage of waw, which is rather
straightforward.

Vadim Cherny


> I was thinking recently about the mystery of vav-consequtive. My
understandning is that the first imperfect verb brings the reference point
in time to the event of that first action, and then all consequtive verbs
would be in the future as seen from that reference point in time. This is a
different sense of time compared to modern languages.
>
> Traditionally the imperfect verbs in vav-consequtive form are translated
as perfect. However, if the above understanding of vav-consequtive is
correct, the actual  time of their action with respect to the present moment
is unknow. It is unknown whether the action has been finished by now, or it
is still going to be finished. The only thing known for sure is that the
action was not finished at the moment of the first action in the
vav-consequtive sentence. So the form of the verbs (and time of actions) in
vav-consequtive form would rather be determined by exegesis and context.
>
> For example, in Genesis 2.1-2.3 the actions are translated in perfect
form: "And the heaven and earth were finished". However, literal translation
would rather be that they are not finished at the time when the action of
the first verb in the vav-chain happened (which is probably Gen1.1), but
it's unknown whether they are finished by the present moment or not.
>
> Would you agree with this understandidng of vav-consequtive phenomenon?
>
>
> Shalom,
> Evgeny
>
>
>
>
>
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