Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> Tense describes the reference time from narrator's point of view.
>
> That is to say, future tense must refer to the future from the
> narrator's
> deictic centre, and past tense likewise.
>
> Now, narrator's deictic centre might be shifted, and so future tense
> sometimes refers to the past events - from the point of view of the
> reader
> or of narrator's contemporaries. This is still future tense.
>
> Does that seem reasonable?
>
>
> SB: Perfectly reasonable. And how many tenses do you recognize?

qatal - past
weqatal - future. Note common role of waw as reversing device in
qatal/weqatal and hiphil/hophal.
q'tol - imperative
yiqtol - late form of the future tense, derived from imperative
wayiqtol - last form of the past tense, symmetrically modeled upon weqatal.
Note its predominant usage to impute the sense of archaic narration.
Hebrew doesn't have present tense, and rightly so: an action is either ended
(thus past tense), or continues into the future (thus, FT).  The qotel form
is late and is not really a verb.

Vadim Cherny