Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Karl,

Last year, a student of mine completed the thesis, "The Temporal 
Reference of Verbs in Direct Speech in Classical Hebrew" for his MA 
degree. His corpus consisted of Genesis, 1, 2 Samuel, the Minor 
Prophets, and several Psalms.

He gave a thorough discussion of the problems of identifying "direct 
speech," and he was careful to include only passages that met his 
criteria for direct speech.

Below I give some of his statistics for present reference for the 
participle (P) and for QATAL (Q). The the numbers indicate the 
percentage of the participle and Qatal of all the verbs with present 
reference in a particular book:

Genesis: P 33.7%  Q 41.6%
1 Samuel: P 37.9%  Q 28.2%
2 Samuel:  P 27.7% Q 49.2%
Minor Prophets, narrative contexts P 58.3% Q 25.0%
Minor prophets, prophetic speech contexts: P 15.4% Q 46.2%
Psalms, direct speech: P 0% Q 41%
Psalms, poetic speech: P 5.2% Q 41.1%

From this statistics (and I have nothing to do with his numbers, I 
only was his mentor) we see that QATALs with present reference in 
direct speech are just as numerous as the participle.

I would like to mention that the committee for the evaluation of this 
thesis was the professors Steven Fassberg, the Hebrew University, and 
Bo Isaksson from the University of Stockholm, both being very 
experienced Hebrew scholars. If there had been basic flaws in the 
arguments or the statistics, they would have detected that. But their 
judgement was that the thesis was a very good work. So clearly, the 
participle is not THE Hebrew form for present reference.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo





> Rolf:
>
> I wonder how many present referent conversations were recorded in Tanakh?
>
> Genesis 3 records one (the second conversation is all past and future
> references):
>
> Verse 2: "we eat" Yiqtol.
>
> Verse 5: "God knows" Qatal, "knowing" participle future referent.
>
> Genesis 4:7 RBC could either be a Qatal or a participle, though it is
> a present referent, we cannot know for certain its form.
>
> (A question just occurred to me, how many of those verses that we
> presently take as participles, may have been Qatals instead?)
>
> Genesis 4:9 "I don't know" Qatal present, followed by a participle
> used as a noun.
>
> Genesis 19:13 M$XTYM if used as a participle is a future referent, if
> as a noun can be present.
>
> Genesis 22:12 "I know" Qatal present.
>
> Genesis 29:5 "we know" Qatal present.
>
> I don't have time right now to continue, but the picture so far shows
> that the present is not necessarily indicated by the noun/pronoun with
> a participle, rather that the Qatal is widely used. and where we have
> a noun/pronoun with a participle it is not necessarily a present. In
> other contexts, the present is often referenced with a Yiqtol.
> Therefore, my conclusion based on what I have seen so far is that the
> present is not grammaticalized with a noun/pronoun with participle
> structure.
>
> To be complete, we would need to track down all recorded conversations
> and analyze them, but in the incomplete survey so far, it seems as if
> the Qatal is used more often than the participle as the verb denoting
> a present reference.
>
> Karl W. Randolph.
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