Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi George,

The situation with a verbal system is often not a simple as you suggest. 
It is not simply the presence vs absence of tense-marking morphemes 
which creates tensed vs non-tensed distinctions, but also the wider 
constructional and paradigmatic inventory. That is, some languages such 
as English require a morpheme in the present tense indicating such. 
Others use tensed morphemes only outside the present tense, with the 
present tense using no morpheme as such. Others grammaticalize a 
nonverbal copula morpheme in the present from third-person pronouns and 
demonstratives. (See further Leon Stassen, _Intransitive Predication_.)

What this means is that your hypothesis that the verbless clause in BH 
is a non-tensed construction due to the absence of a tense-indicating 
morpheme is premature. The hypothesis needs to be additionally situated 
in the wider paradigmatic structure of the language.

Regards,
David Kummerow.


> I agree with you in large part, Naama. Tense is indicated mostly by the 
> deictic markers in the clause - that is, those elements that are not 
> part of the verb, but which indicate something about the circumstance 
> and context of the verb.
>
> I think that tense is, ultimately, an unhelpful category that we 
> European-language speakers have unhelpfully imposed onto Semitic 
> languages. Yes, we need to think about tense in the process of 
> translation, since our European-based languages employ tense as a basic 
> communicative category. However, I don't think biblical Hebrew has 
> tense, and therefore when trying to understand biblical Hebrew on its 
> own terms, it gets in the way.
>
> Both the simple noun clause and the participial clause are verbless 
> clauses - there is nothing there to indicate tense. Hebrew is simply 
> making basic equative statements in these cases: X = /X/. I would argue 
> that since biblical Hebrew works on essentially presenting mainline 
> actions to be viewed 'live', that present tense is usually inferred from 
> verbless clauses because the reader is 'in the moment' of the text.
>
> BTW - great to 'see' you here!
>
>
> Regards,
>
> GEORGE ATHAS
> Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
> www.moore.edu.au