Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 09/08/2005 08:30, Vadim Cherny wrote:

> From Rolf's examples, it is clear that Hebrew, like Russian, allows 
> deictic shift in emphatic phrases. That is, a speaker who is mentally 
> transposed into the past events, changes his deictic center from the 
> present to that past. He can, therefore, employ future and present 
> tenses describing the past perfect events.
>  
> Theoretically, a person could be similarly transposed in the future 
> events, and employ past tense when emphatically relating about the 
> future from his futuristic deictic center. That, however, is properly 
> a description not of the future events, but of the past vision of 
> them. Thus, past tense is employed to refer to the past perfect, a vision.
>  
> Past tense could be used to describe relative order of events in the 
> future in rare special cases, "Even if he *were* killed, he will 
> accomplish his mission." In such cases, past tense is employed 
> alongside the future tense.
>  
> Use of grammatical tenses in these examples is consistent with use of 
> tenses in regular speech: past tense describes the events left of the 
> deictic center, future tense - right of that center. The deictic 
> center normally corresponds to the present, but is shifted sometimes 
> in emphatic speech when speaker feels immersed into the events.


Thank you, Vadim. This makes sense. It seems to me (from my admittedly 
incomplete understanding) that you have put your finger on one of the 
inadequacies of Rolf's analysis of Hebrew verb forms, that he seems to 
have assumed a deictic centre corresponding to the present, or to put it 
equivalently (I think, but maybe Rolf can correct me on the linguistic 
terminology) he seems to have assumed that if Hebrew verb forms are 
tenses they can only be absolute tenses, not relative tenses. For 
example, he has correctly noted that some WAYYIQTOL forms refer to the 
absolute future, but as far as I know has not allowed that they might be 
past relative to a displaced deictic centre.

Yesterday I wrote a rather tongue in cheek suggestion that Ezekiel's 
Temple must have actually been built. After all, the measuring of the 
completed structure is described with WAYYIQTOL forms e.g. 40:4,6. Rolf, 
did you count these WAYYIQTOLs as future? They are of course future in 
the sense that this temple had not actually been built in Ezekiel's time 
- that is, if it is assumed that Ezekiel expected this to be built 
literally, rather than being a vision of something already existing in 
heaven. But, within the literary context of Ezekiel's vision, they are 
of course past, because Ezekiel's narrative of his vision is written as 
if at the end of it he is telling of what he has seen, in the recent past.

This seems to be a clear case of a deictic centre displaced into the 
future. But in prophetic writing there may be many other cases of this 
which are not so clearly indicated.

>  
> Thus, Hebrew verb affixes are consistent with tenses.


But there are still highly problematic cases. I might accept that 
WAYYIQTOL is an actual (relative) past tense - although Rolf does not. 
But it is clear that X-YIQTOL is not a pure future tense, but is also a 
tenseless imperfective, that is that it can be used where Russian would 
use past, present or future imperfective aspect.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/