Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

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