Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear James,

In 1:5 we find the verb KR) (to call) first as a 
WAYYIQTOL and then as a QATAL. The traditional 
view is that both forms have the same aspect-they 
are perfective. But I analyze the WAYYIQTOL as 
imperfective and the QATAL as perfective.  This 
means that a I take the WAY(Y) as a syntactical 
and not as a grammatical element.

A good English example of an imperfective construction is 1)

1) While Adam was sleeping, Ann entered the room.

2) and, while he was asleep (WAYYIQTOL), he took 
out (WAYYIQTOL) one of his ribs and closed up its 
place with flesh.

The event of entering intersects the state of 
sleeping, as it were. We have a similar example 
with two WAYYIQTOLs in Gen 2:21. The NAB 
rendering is seen in 2). The situation here is 
that Adam was asleep, and during his sleep, God 
took one of his ribs. The sleeping state is 
intersected by the taking event- and this is 
expressed by a WAYYIQTOL.

Other examples corroborating the syntactical view of WAW/WAY(Y) is 2:5-6 (NAB)

3) while there yet was (YIQTOL) no field shrub on 
the earth and no grass of the field had yet 
sprouted  (YIQTOL), for the LORD had sent (QATAL) 
no rain upon the earth and there was no (nominal 
cl.) man to till the soil, but a stream was 
welling up (YIQTOL) out of the earth and was 
watering (WEQATAL) all the  surface of the ground.

There is a syntactical reason why three YIQTOLs 
with past reference are used in 3), namely, that 
an adverbial precedes the two first and a 
substantive the third. Therefore, they cannot 
have any WAY(Y) element. (Please do not use the 
old ad hoc argument regarding +RM-it has 
absolutely no substance. Note also that the first 
YIQTOL signals the state of being; so it cannot 
be argued that its force is iterative or 
frequentative). We also note the QATAL and the 
WEQATAL with the same time reference as the 
YIQTOLs.

Then back to 1:5. In my dissertation I argue that 
the perfective and the imperfective aspect have 
some characteristics in common and others that 
are mutually exclusive. Further I argue that when 
the requirement for precision is high, only the 
one aspect that has the correct force in this 
instance can be used. But when the requirement of 
precision is not great, both aspects can be used 
to signal the same situation (sometimes we use a 
phonemic transcription which is less detailed, 
other times we use the more detailed phonetic 
transcription of the same word). The point in 1:5 
is that God named day and night, and the details 
of this naming are not important. However, if we 
want to look at the details, the naming of the 
light is imperfective, and this aspect makes 
visible a part of the action ("he began to," "he 
continued to," "he used to"), or the resultant 
state -which is open-ended-can also be made 
visible (In Joshua 7:6 the result of falling to 
the earth, namely lying prostrate all day, is 
made visible). The difference between a 
perfective and an imperfectice Hebrew verb is not 
easily being transferred to English-and the 
requirement of precision is not high-therefore I 
see no problem is using simple past in both cases 
in an English translation. But I have a positive 
view of translations that try to convey they 
nuances by translating the first expression "he 
began to call" and the second "he called".

While the Hebrew and Greek aspects in many 
respects are similar, they are in some respects 
different. I analyze Greek present as -tense + 
the imperfective aspect; aorist as -tense + the 
perfective aspect; and imperfect as +past tense + 
the imperfective aspect. It is true that one 
function of Greek imperfect is "inceptive" 
(Fanning, p. 252), but this force is rather rare 
and is not easy to detect. We therefore see that 
often - as in Genesis 1:5-the LXX translators 
used aorist for WAYYIQTOL. That did not 
necessarily mean that they took WAYYIQTOL to be 
perfective, but they may have thought that this 
form was adequate to convey the message, even 
though all the details of the original were not 
made visible.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
Univesity of Oslo







> Hi all and especially Rolf,
> I was thinking about this phrase from the first paragraph of Genesis: Âȗ¯ý
> ýϔÈÌÝÏý¯ÝÈÂÌÝÂÏÁ˜Íݗ¯ýÝÏÈϔ
>
> I was wondering (Rolf) how you understand the sense of these verbs? It seems
> clear to me that the author intended both verbs to be interpreted in the
> exact same way. We have already all agreed that neither form necessarily
> conveys an obligatory temporal sense but the context makes it clear that the
> author is describing events in the distant past. In this way the translators
> of the LXX seem to be in agreement:
>
> É»Éø? ?É»¿ÉŠÉˆÉ-ɈÉÀ ? ɐɈ?V É-? É"?V 
> ?É ¤É¦ÉøÉÀ É»Éø? É-? É-É»ÞÉ-ÉÕV ?É»¿ÉŠÉˆÉ-ɈÉÀ 
> ÉÀýÉ»É-Éø
>
> James Christian
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