Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Yitzhak,

This post and the next one of yours got me to actually looking over 
Rolf's dissertation. It seems to me that while much time, effort, and 
dedication has been spent, there are significant omissions, at least for 
such a study which sets out to be definitive and comprehensive:

1. Comprehensive and in-depth treatment of apocopation is lacking. There 
is a bare minimum of interaction with secondary literature, with the 
listing of statistics taken as proof. Indeed, empathetic weighing of 
alternate positions is basically non-existent. The treatment found in 
the dissertation is basically that which has been spelt out here, so 
Peter is right to ask Rolf to deal with the evidence he raises.

2. The place of paragogic nun is not investigated. This has bearing 
because it is commonly stated that it only attaches to the long prefix verb.

3. The distribution of the third-person pronominal suffixes augmented 
with nun is not investigated. This has bearing because these suffixes 
are commonly stated to be only used with the long prefix verb. Now I 
don't think Hetzron is right in his contention that these suffixes were 
originally used after an original short -u- vowel, but for such a study 
to be comprehensive, the position needs to be weighed---not least 
because if Hetzron happened to be correct, then the evidence even more 
strongly points to the existence of long and short prefix verbs.

4. Verbal distributions of the kind I mentioned---"yesterday" and 
"tomorrow"---are not investigated, or at least not presented overtly in 
the presentational analysis. But it is just this which is needed, in my 
opinion. Other types of constructional verbal distributions of the like 
I have been advocating are similarly not investigated or at least 
overtly presented, eg the default use of qatal in non-paratactic 
constructions being anterior tense, etc. Why is this? Such questions or 
avenues are not investigated.

5. I notice quite a few bibliographic references that I would have liked 
to be included are missing. But simple inclusion is not enough: 
interaction also.

6. Though statistics are given, the raw data is not. I would like some 
sort of appendix where, say, all wayyiqtols with future reference are 
listed.

Hope this helps your potential book purchase, one way or another!

Regards,
David Kummerow.


> 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