Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Isaac,

I argue that wayyiqtols represent deictic center shift and should generally
be read, "and + future tense verb." I listed several arguments to that end
in the previous discussion. Also note the historical absence of wayyiqtols:
Hexapla doesn't differentiate wayyiqtols from weyiqtols.
The narrator immerses himself into the events, pauses, his deictic center
shifts, and the related events are in the future for him. He thus employs
future tense. Such usage of future tense is extremely common in old Russian
and sounds completely natural to me. In fact, that's how I've always read
the Tanakh and encountered no semantic problem whatsoever.

Lev1:1 could be strictly translated in broken English, "And he will call".
The narrator is immersed into the events, pauses before starting the
recital, and the divine words are in the future from his shifted deictic
center. Again, there is an issue of linguistic mentality. I imagine it is
hard for native English and German speakers to comprehend such flexibility
of deictic center, but such shifts are perfectly ok in Russian.

Vadim Cherny


> I would translate VAYIKRA of Lev. 1:1 as "Then he called". The verse
> contains no definite articles, and "Lord" is only fifth in line. It
> is also not clear to me where you got this alien "would".
> Isaac Fried, Boston University
>
> On Mar 19, 2007, at 8:26 AM, Vadim Cherny wrote:
>
> >
> >> 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
> >
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