Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Dear Marjorie,

Your question is personal, but I think an answer can be informative for
the list-members, since the work with a dissertation both has a sociological
side (what is your horizon of understanding; which knowledge in which areas
have you already acquired) and a side governed by chance (which professor
happens to teach you, and what is his or her view on Hebrew verbs).  A real
problem when a student starts to study Hebrew, is that the curriculum is so
big that the possibility of independent thinking is minimal. Moreover, in
any level of study, if a student voices ideas contrary to the established
ones, he or she may not get the exam. Thus, there is a tendency to curtail
new, or radical ideas, and this prevents scientific progress. This also
works on the highest level of study. Research was done on which projects in
Oslo were accepted as worthy of a Ph.D study, and the conclusion was that
the accepted projects was those with working hypoteses which were in line
with the views of the professors on the committee, and those that were not
were rejected. There is also a new procedure that has developed, which, in my
view,  even more curtails free research and scientific progress, and this is
that the professors now, at least in Oslo, have been given more power to
decide the subjects for Ph.D studies. Moreover, they may sometimes serve as
parcipitants in the projects rather that as mere consultants. So, both for
economic reasons (you do not get funds for radical projects) and because you 
do not
get your exam or your degree if you have ideas which deviate too much from
the standard ideas, free thinking is curtailed. The result is that only sides 
of the established ideas are
studied, these ideas are applauded, and there is little progress. A
situation not very different from this is seen in Hebrew studies from end of
the 19th century and up to the present. A typical example is the creation of
the ad hoc hypothesis of  "prophetic perfect," which was invented in the
19th centuries. It has since been parroted over and over again in Grammars and
Textbooks, but I have never seen any serious attempt to *prove*  it (See
Gesenius-Kautzsch 106, n (p.312) and Waltke-O´Connor 30. 5.1e (pp. 489-490).
And that is natural, since it is a psychological explanation, it requires a
knowledge of the minds of dead prophets.

On this background I return to your question. The first time I realised
problems with the understanding of the Hebrew verbal system was in 1961 when
I read about it in the Foreword of the New World Translation. It caught my
attention, but I forgot it until I read the book  "The Enigma of the Hebrew
Verbal System" (1982) by L. McFall. This historical demonstration of the
shaky foundation of the traditional WAYYIQTOL view really was an eyeopener.
(Both these incidents can be subsumed under the heading "Chance"; which
books do you happen to read, and which persons do you happen to meet.)
Between these events I had studied the Philosophy of Science and different
disciplines in the natural sciences, and particularly the reasoning of K.
Popper had impressed me, for example, by the application of induction and
deduction you can never hope to prove anything; that is impossible,  but you
can hope to falsify things. And, a hypothesis should be formed in a way as
to be falsifyable.

When I started my studies of Hebrew, I had two advantages: I was a grown man 
with experience, not so easily manipulated as younger students, and I had a 
strong theoretical basis for critical thinking. Moreover, the professor who 
taught me Semitic languages, E. E. Knudsen, was very knowledgable, had an 
open 
mind, and encouraged his students to do critical thinking different from his 
own. Under his 
supervision I wrote the thesis "Imperfect Consecutive and the Verbal System 
of Biblical Hebrew" (362 p) in 1995 for the mag.art.degree (close to an US 
Ph.D) and in 2005 I defended the doctoral dissertation, which already has 
been reviewed. What did influence me? First of all, the principles I had 
learned in my study of the Philosophy of science, not least to find the 
smallest possible units and study each of these. I read extensively from 
previous Semitic studies (one of the positive remarks of the evaluation 
committee 
for my dissertation was that no important source relevant for the study was 
lacking in the bibliography), and I realized that published studies of 
Hebrew verbs represented blatant violations of the  very fundamental 
principles of the Philosophy of science (the results of deductive and 
inductive studies were taken as proofs for the hypotheses and theories). I 
realized that the principles of the study of the natural sciences were not 
fully applicable in a humanistic study, particularly not in the study of a 
dead language. But the principles could to a great extent be applied, and at 
least, they should not be violated. For example, one application of the 
falsification principle can be the following prediction: If the WAYYIQTOL is 
an independent conjugation coding for past tense, we will expect that the 
reference time of the actions of the clauses with WAYYIQTOL in the Tanakh 
occur before the deictic center; in a non-technical language: we will expect 
the WAYYIQTOLs to have past reference. If we can find a reasonable number of 
WAYYIQTOLs with non-past reference, the prediction is falsified.  I will 
quickly 
add that in the examples with non-past tense we must be open for textual 
corruption, exceptions, special contexts, special conventions in different 
genres, diachronic questions, and that a language is a living medium etc. But 
these issues should be studied in a 
scientific way, and the examples should not be brushed away by the argument 
that languge is fuzzy, or the WAYYIQTOL is not yet fully grammaticalized as 
apast tense. This prediction was a basic tool for my thesis of 1995. The NWT 
had caused 
me to be critical towards the modern theories of WAYYIQTOL, but its 
grammatical theory did not influence me at all, since this was a study of 
text, of all the WAYYIQTOLs of the Tanakh on the basis of the falsification 
principle. Grammatical theories therefore were unnecessary.

In 1997, M. Broman Olsen´s dissertation "A Semantic and Pragmatic Model of 
Lexical and Grammatical Aspect" was published, and when reading it, I 
realized that she had created a very simple, but elegeant linguistic model, 
which was in perfect accord with the principles of Popper and the natural 
sciences. I had used a similar approach in my 1995 thesis, but without 
defining an elegant model. I therefore used Olsen´s model as a point of 
departure in my dissertation, but disagrees with her in the view that aspect 
is the same in all aspectual languages. So again, the grammatical theories of 
the NWT, of S. R. Driver, D. Michel and others were unnecessary in the work 
with the dissertation. It was a study of the whole text of classical Hebrew 
on  the basis of principles parallel to those used in the study of the 
natural sciences.

I would like to use two examples from Broman Olsen (1997: 17) in order to 
illustrate the difference between semantic meaning and conversational 
pragmatic implicature (which part of the meaning is based on the context, and 
which part is an intrinsic property of a word or a form). The question is: 
"Are slowly and tired partsof the semantic meaning of plod?

"I adopt the distinction between semantic meaning and conversational 
pragmatic implicature from Grine (1975): semantic meanings may not be 
canceled without contradiction or reinforced without redundancy. Thus 
"slowly"  is part of the semantic meaning of plod, since it may not be 
canceled without contradiction or reinforced without redundancy, as shown in 
(14a) and (14b), respectively.

(14)  (a) Elsie plodded along, #but not slowly.

        (b) Elsie plodded along, #? slowly.

In contrast, conversational pragmatic implicature may be canceled or 
reinforced without contradiction or redundancy. "Tiredness" is therefore 
associated with "plod" by conversational pragmatic implicature, since it is 
both cancelable and reinforcable, as 15 shows.

(15)  (a) Margaret plodded along, although she wasn´t tired.

        (b) Margaret plodded along; she was very tired."


Regarding tense Broman Olsen (p. 121) writes:

"The relation between RT /reference time/ and C /the deictic center/ is part 
of a truth conditional or semantic meaning  and is therefore not cancelable, 
hence the oddity of the temporal phrases of (6a-c), which attempt to cancel 
past, present,and future reference, respectively.

(6) (a) #Jeanette was old tomorrow.

     (b) #Jeanette is old, but not now.

    (c) #Jeanette will be old yesterday."

 
I now return to your question again.  I knew the grammatical theory of the 
NWT when I started my research.  In my thesis of 1995 I discussed about 450 
particular examples of WAYYIQTOLs with non-past reference. And in each case I 
listed the tense chosen by 20 different Bible translations in Norwegian, 
Swedish, Danish, English, German, and French, but I did not use the NWT. In 
my dissertation work I neither  used the NWT or any other Bible translation 
in any phase of the work. But in one very important respect the NWT (and L. 
McFall) influenced me: becauseof these I was at the outset sceptical to the 
traditional explanation of Hebrew verbs.

A few words on the NWT:  I did not use it in my dissertation work, but after 
completing it I have written two books on Bible translation. One of them 
deals with how theology and bias influence Bible translation.  In this book I 
compare the very literal NWT and the idiomatic TEV. In connection with this 
book I made a deep study of both versions. The NWT is a translation for Bible 
students, since the translators tried to convey the nuances of the verbs much 
more detailed than other versions. Thus, we find hundreds of examples of  
WAYYIQTOLs rendered as "He began to..., he proceeded to..., he continued 
to..., he was xxxing..., renderings that for themostpart  are lacking in 
other versions. There are also many other nuances that are conveyed, such as 
differences in meaning when a  QATAL and a YIQTOL are used with future 
reference. The advantage of this for the reader is the possibility to find 
details which are not found in other versions; the disadvantage of a literal 
translation is the tendency to use many words and sometimes the clauses 
become wooden.  I can think of no better modern version for those who are 
interested in the details of the original text than the NWT. I say this, 
particularly because my study has shown that the translators were extremely 
(I mean "extremely") careful to be consistent in the rendering of the Hebrew 
text; infinitive constructs rendered in one way, e.g.,  infinitive avsolutes 
in another, and participles still in another way whenever possible. This is 
not the case with other versions

As for grammatical theory, the translation was made in the late 40s and early 
50s, and the translators had to use the extant grammatical literature. In 
addition, and this is clearly seen by a word-for-word comparison of the 
Hebrew text and their renderings, in the comittee there  were very competent 
hebraists who worked independently with the Hebrew grammar. Thus, they came 
to the conclusion that the WAYYIQTOL  theory was obsolete, and they ignored 
it in their translation. That was a truly corageous step at that time. Their 
grammatical  terminology was colored by the terminology of the time and is 
very different from the terminology of my dissertation. Their definitions 
naturally are cruder than mine, since the concepts of reference time, event 
time and deictic center was unknown to them. Moreover, they stress different 
sides of the Hebrew aspects compared with what I do. Nonetheless, because of 
their fine knowledge of Hebrew and their carefulness, they managed to render 
the verbs in a way that is corroborated by the definitions of my dissertation 
except in the case of some QATALs with future reference.  By way of 
conclusion I would say that the NWT is a very fine translation, but its 
gramatical theory and renderings did not influence my dissertation work.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: <MarjorieAlley AT cs.com>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 1:31 AM
Subject: [b-hebrew] Question for Rolf on the JW outlook on the Hebrew
verbalsystem


> Rolf ---
>
> On the question of the "Jehovah's Witness outlook on the verbal system,"
> I've just been rereading Appendix 3C "Hebrew Verbs Indicating Continuous
> or
> Progressive Action, " pp. 1572-1573  of the Watchtower Society's 1984 "New
> World
> Translation of the Holy Scriptures - With References."
>
snip
>
>
> [...]   The New World Translation has not followed the unfounded theory of
> Waw Consecutive when translating Hebrew verbs. This age-old theory does
> not
> convey the power and forcefulness of the Hebrew verbs in their original
> states.
> Therefore, the New World Translation presents the Hebrew verbs with
> accurate
> meaning and dynamism by maintaining a distinction between the perfect and
> the
> imperfect states of the Hebrew verbs."
>
>
> I realize you have devoted many years of research to your project and have
> consulted numerous sources.
>
> Can you help clarify whether this appendix in the 1984 NWT Bible played
> some
> part in helping to shape the direction of your research into the Hebrew
> verbal
> system?
>
> Were you familiar with it when you started your research? I am just
> curious
> as to whether you attribute some degree of influence on your thinking to
> the JW
> outlook on the Hebrew verbal system?
>
> (I realize, of course, that we all have our biases, and perhaps it is the
> ones we are *unconscious* of which are most likely to cause us to see what
> we
> *expect* to see when we examine the text.)
>
> Regards,
> Marjorie Alley
>


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo
>From kwrandolph AT gmail.com  Wed Mar 21 12:18:32 2007
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Yigal:

Thanks.

All the records from Egypt that I found from that period seemed rather
spotty (i.e. quite incomplete), and I wondered if there was any
surviving record. Apparently not.

In the absence of more data, he apparently was a Nubian general under
a Libyan pharaoh, and we are guessing.

Thanks again. Karl W. Randolph.

On 3/19/07, Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il> wrote:
> Dear Karl,
>
> The fact is, that no ruler by this name is known, and there was no known
> invasion of the land from the south after Shishak....
>
> Yigal Levin