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  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] How does biblical Hebrew describe a present event? (was Survey)
  • Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:28:04 +0200

Dear Karl,

This has been an extremely busy day for me, and I give a few short remarks to your post, not about diglossia, but about prose and poetry. I will later comment on Randall's post.

In discussions of Hebrew verbs we often hear repeated over and over again that the meaning of Hebrew verbs is different in prose and in poetry. I have never seen this demonstrated in any scholarly study, and from a linguistic point of view, the idea is strange indeed. I am not aware of any language where verb *meaning* is different in prose and poetry. If anyone on the list subscribes to this idea, the challenge is to demonstrate it!

I do not know what Randall's opinion is, but poetry is excluded from the situations where we can see which verbs are used with present reference. The situations that remains after Ranfall's exclusions are very few and hardly representative for BH. It is true that the temporal reference in some Psalms is not easy to ascertain, and such texts cannot be used for our test. But I would say that at least in 50% of poetic texts the temporal reference is easy to find, so your examples of YIQTOLs with present reference are difficult to put aside if we use normal linguistic principles.

Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo


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.
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