Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> On 18/03/2007 16:55, Vadim Cherny wrote:
> > ...
> > Regarding wayiqtols, would you agree that no evidence contradicts
> > understanding them as "and + future tense" with deictic center shifts?
> >
> Well, on this hypothesis it is difficult to explain the WAYYIQTOLs at
> the beginning of the books WAYYIQRA' = Leviticus and WAYDABBER =
> Numbers, and several others if I remember correctly, including Jonah and
> Ruth which cannot plausibly be understood as continuations of other
> books.

It is interesting how linguistic conventions affect perception of text. I
have always found it difficult to follow the English a/the articles.
In your example, however, as a Russian speaker, I find wayiqtol completely
natural.
Thus, in Lev1:1, "And the Lord would call unto Moses". The narrator took a
stylo, paused, immersed himself in the events, and started in the future
tense.

> And then there certainly are cases where WAYYIQTOL is not
> strictly sequential.

I didn't see them and would appreciate examples.
> So I think you will find it hard to show that
> WAYYIQTOL is always relative future. A more plausible suggestion would
> be that the regular use of this form in narrative originated in cases
> where there was a clearly defined prior deictic centre, and use of the
> form was then generalised to include cases where the deictic centre has
> not been clearly set up. In other words, WAYYIQTOL might have started as
> a relative future tense, but later shifted to be a simple narrative
> tense in fact used at least primarily in the past.

That's a reasonable suggestion, and I also advance it in the expanded
version of the hypothesis. But it critically depends on the discovery of
wayiqtols in documents which clearly lack the deictic center shifts, as the
commercial papyri.

> But this does not explain apocopation

Apocopation is, in my opinion, a purely phonetic issue. When the accent
shifts onto the first syllable, the unaccented final vowel is lost.

Vadim Cherny