Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] And Elohim called light 'Day' and darkness he called night

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] And Elohim called light 'Day' and darkness he called night
  • Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:41:49 +0200

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
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page