Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Dear Rolf,

I also agree that we are clearly moving to an area where I would find myself
in need of reading your own complete study.  Unfortunately, the nearest
library that worldcat lists for this book is in the Netherlands, and after 
that,
in Texas.  Also, it appears to be privately published so I am not sure it
underwent an independent peer-review process, and the one reference I
found to a review of a book of yours was rather critical (it came up because
it quoted the back cover of that book, which contains word-for-word the title
of your dissertation).  I mention these factors only because good reviews of
the book by people whose judgement I trust might have influenced me to buy
the book even if it is not easily accessible.  But this is not the case here,
unfortunately.

Let us take the examples you mentioned: 1 Kings 6.  The other verse
mentioned in the example appears to be a verse you made up.  This is
somewhat significant because you can't go comparing two verses in order
to prove a point about Biblical Hebrew, when one of the verses was not
written by a native speaker of Biblical Hebrew.  You say that an analysis
of the two together shows that a property of the verb form is that the start
and a small part of the event time (ET) is made visible.  But this are several
reasons to doubt this analysis.  First, the next verse automatically assumes
that the house is standing, and describes additional actions made regarding
the house.  So we are left wondering whether the house was built entirely
in the same year, or whether the verb indeed only makes visible the start of
the building.  Then the last verse in the same chapter describes the finishing
of the building.  It says that in the eleventh year the house was
finished.  Now,
obviously this "house" is ambiguous with the second verse since in the last
verse the all house is intended but in the first only the basic unfurnished
house is intended.  So which is it in the first verse?  If that's not
enough, the
last verse goes ahead and says "and he built it seven years".  Now, is that
part of the "In the eleventh year" or not?  After all, your "In the four 
hundred
and eightieth year" is actually part of a verse saying "And it came to
pass in.."
so we are dealing both in 1 Kings 6:1 and 1 Kings 6:38 with a series of
sentences joined together by "and".  Can we say then that in 1 Kings 6:38
the verb is not part of the "And it came to pass in the eleventh year"?  All
this casts serious doubts on your interpretation of the verb form of
[vayyivɛn].  Next we have to ask if or how this form is related to 
"wayyiqtol",
in light of such verses as 1 Kings 18:32 [vayyivnɛ].  Are we dealing with
a different verb form in one, with the same verb form.  How are these two
verb forms related to [vayyivnehu] in 1 Kings 6:38?  We cannot assume to
begin with that any of the above three forms are related (especially if our
thesis is to suggest an entirely new verbal system for Hebrew).  We have to 
find
some reason to suggest that one is related to the other.  None of these are
of the form [wayyiqtol] that we see in other verbs -- is this because of the
verb root ending in -y? or is this because the verb is in a different verb
form entirely?  In comparing with verse 1 Kings 18:32 we may even ask
a different question -- should we identify two different strata of Hebrew
here, one used in 1 Kings 6, say "royal history" and one used in
1 Kings 18:38, say, "prophetic history."  Evidently, from my point of view,
if something can be said from 1 Kings 6:1 it is that very little can be 
learned
directly, and one must wade carefully through the texts, assuming to begin
with that any different spelling or vocalization is different, and
even that the
same spelling may denote two homonymous words, and slowly combine
the various words, keeping an eye to such factors as typological setting of
the text where the form appears.  Thus, it must be done independently for
"Early Biblical Hebrew" texts and "Late Biblical Hebrew Texts".  For each
of these, probably contexts such as poetic uses versus prose uses have to
be analyzed independently.  All these have to be analyzed independently
in Tiberian vocalization, Babylonian vocalization, Israelite vocalization.
Though limited in the coverage of the above areas, we could also use
Hexaplaric vocalization and Qumran spelling of the Biblical texts.  The
Qumran could further be subdivided according to the categories of
plene-ness.  Of course, one doesn't have to analyze it all, but since you
describe your study as one of having examined all cases, I am describing
here how a careful methodology would examine this.  In each combination
(say, "Late Biblical Hebrew - poetic - Tiberian vocalization"), one begins by
assuming each verb form is unrelated to another, and the same verb form
may connote several homonymous words, and then goes about seeing
how one may combine the various forms of words in order to get a
consistent picture of verbal morphology.

This may sound like a lot.  Indeed, for a verbal system, this may indeed be
too much to undertake for a single study.  But look at Goerwitz's
dissertation on
pausal forms at: http://www.goerwitz.com/papers/dissertation/thpformsl.pdf
At page 84 of the PDF he begins basically a similar analysis for pausal forms
as I have outlined above (although excluding differentiation into categories
such as LBH/EBH or poetic/non-poetic, which probably matter less for pausal
forms than they do for verbal morphology).  In the end, he makes a convincing
analysis of the data.  Part of the reason it is convincing (to me,
anyway) is that he
follows the above steps of methodology.

Like I said, though, the discussion is probably at a point where I
should read your
dissertation.  However, it is not available at a nearby library, so
this is somewhat
hard to do.  In the bottom line, though, your discussion of your
methods and your
examples continue to give an air of flawed methodology.  It may be
that reading the
dissertation will prove that wrong, of course, but the feeling I get
from your online
examples is that your study is methodologically flawed.

Yitzhak Sapir