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  • From: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Fw: Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)
  • Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 11:16:07 -0000

Dear Yitzhak,

My dissertation is not published privately but by Awatu Publishers, Oslo
Norway (awatu AT online.no), and it is
distributed by Eisenbrauns. I know that the publisher has sent exemplars
for a peer-review to several scholarly journals. But keeping in mind the
work-load of a professor and that fact that the book has 516 pages, it may
take some time for a review to appear. Why not ask your University library
to buy a copy?

----- Original Message ----- From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2007 4:23 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Fw: Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)


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.

RF
I may not have explained my case adequately. The only point I tried to
convey by my examples 1) and 2) was that our knowledge of the world helps us
see that in 1 Kings 6:1 the beginning and first part of the action of the
WAYYIQTOL is made visible. From a methodological point of view there is no
problem to form a clause for comparison.

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.

RF
All Bible translations which I have consulted interpret the verse as I do. 1
Kings 6:1 tells about the start of the work as do 2 Chronicles 3:1-3 where
we find XLL + infinitive. There evidently is a lot of time between 1 Kings
6:1 and 6:2.

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].

RF
I am not sure I understand your arguments above completely, but I will make
some comments.
In 6:38 we find one QATAL and one WAYYIQTOL. Both actions were factually
completed when the verse was written. The question which is important for
me, who distinguish between semantics and pragmatics, is: Which factors signal
that the actions were completed, the verb form, the aktionsart/lexical
meaning, the context...? Please consider the examples below. In each case
the actions were factually completed when the text was written, but this is
hardly signalled by the verbform, since 1), 2), and 3) are infinitives, 4)
is a passive participle, and 5) is an active participle. This shows that the
form WAYYIQTOL in 6:38 need not be what signals that the action was
finished.


1) ...was heard at the temple while it was built. 1 Kings 6:7

2) When you built your mound... Ezekiel 16:31

3) ...until Solomon built the temple of YHWH. 1 Chronicle 6:17

4) Your neck is like the tower of David, built with elegance. Song 4:4

5) with kings and counselors of the earth, who built desolate places for
themselves Job 3:14

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.

RF

It appears that our approaches are very different. In my approach I need only two things to ascertain what is made visible of the WAYYIQTOL in 1 Kings 6:1, the sentence where the verb is found and the knowledge that it took several years to build the temple. While I of course look at the context and make a discourse analysis, the two factors are enough to draw a legitimate linguistic conclusion. As for the WAYYIQTOL of 1 Kings 18:38, in my view it is exactly the same form as in 6:1. As I showed in my previous post, the differences between a short and long prefix form in the cognate languages is a vowel after the first root consonant. The Hebrew YIQTOLs and WAYYIQTOLs are therefore short prefix forms, and I see absolutely no reason to view an apocopated lamed he verb as a different form compared with a full form. The same is true with YIQTOLs, WAYYIQTOLs and imperatives with cohortative endings; the ending does not change the form. In Nehemiah 3:37 and 13:14 we find the same verb MXH after )L, one is apocopated, and the other is not. But that does not show that the verbs belong to two different conjugations.

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.

This would be an interesting study, but most of it is unnecessary in order to find how many conjugations classical Hebrew has.

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.

No model is perfect, and neither is mine. But it deserves to be studied.


Yitzhak Sapir
_______________________________________________


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo





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