Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

After reading Randall’s and Rolf’s comments, I did a quick read of
Proverbs 16–17 (it was on my schedule anyways). While it is true that
this is poetry, I noticed that the largest number of verbs with
present tense meanings were imperfects, with participles making up the
second most common, while perfects by far least often used, though
even those mostly with present meaning. (I could go back and do
statistical analysis, but I don’t think that is necessary.)

A question comes up, how much diglossia was there in Biblical times,
between written and spoken languages? I suspect there was more than we
think. The problem for us today is that there were very few present
tense prose conversations recorded in Tanakh. I suspect that most of
the verbal uses of the participles in Hebrew were very similar to the
English verbal participle use, and where English does not use the
participle, Biblical Hebrew generally (I need to use a fuzzy factor
because the languages are not exactly parallel in their uses) used
either the imperfect or perfect.

So while I suspect there was more noun/pronoun participle use in
spoken language than preserved in Tanakh, I don’t think it was near as
much as in modern Hebrew.

Karl W. Randolph.