Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

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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