Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>]

RE: [b-hebrew] Verbs, text-segmenting and clause-typesDear James,

Both YIQTOLs and QATALs can be translated with  future and future perfect.  
Future perfect is chosen for pragmatic reasons, where the lexical meaning of 
the verbs play an important role. In English, future perfect is a combination 
of the future tense and the perfectic aspect, and it can represent past in 
the future. Your suggestion "though he will have done no violence" exactly 
expresses my viewpoint and could have been used by my.  The reason why I used 
"though he had done no violence and there was no deception in his mouth" may 
be because I am no native speaker of English.   Since the presence of the 
servant had been established as future in relation to the deictic center, and 
the verse speaks about the death of the servant, I thought that a pluperfect 
and simple past would signal that that during the servant`s life (in the 
future) and before his death he did no violence and no deception was found. I 
felt that my choice of English verb tenses served the same role as future 
perfects, and that this was a smother way of expression.


Best regards

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Read, James C 
  To: Rolf Furuli 
  Cc:  
  Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:51 AM
  Subject: RE: [b-hebrew] Verbs, text-segmenting and clause-types


  Rolf wrote:53:9 He will assign (WAYYIQTOL) his grave with the wicked ones, 
and with the
  rich in his death, though he had done (QATAL) no violence, and there was no
  deception in
  his mouth (nominal cl.).

  end quote.

  In your translation you were using the future more or less
  consistently and the you decide to render 'he had done (QATAL)
  no violence, and there was no deception in his mouth'.
  On what basis did you decide to switch to the past here?
  Could it not just as easily have been:

  'though he will have done no violence'? 


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