Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Joseph Justiss <jljustiss AT msn.com>]

It is time for me to make some more comments for clarification.

 

1. In my original post Sailhamer and Scneider do not use the word "tense" to 
refer to verbal forms with built in time reference. They just use it because 
of convenience to refer to the various verbal forms encountered in BH's 
morphology. 

 

2. Sailhamer would agree that the wayyiqtol does not have past reference. 
Their contention is that when a BH author wants to construct a narrative and 
signal to his reader that he is refering to events which are no longer 
present within the domain of the author-reader context he uses the wayyiqtol 
verb form/"tense" to generate a narrative text. When that same author wants 
to provide information that is background to the current narrative, or wants 
to refer back to an event on a previous wayyiqtol chain he uses qatal verbal 
forms.

 

This system is an attempt to explain the generation of Hebrew narrative texts 
moving from form to function. I think it is worthy of serious consideration 
because of its ability to explain texts and because after centuries of 
studies the best and brightest minds in the field of Hebrew grammar still 
lack serious consensus as to the function of the verbal forms. Perhaps this 
is not in spite of our methodology, but precisely because of our methodology. 
Let's look for a better more promising methodology. I think it will come from 
"form to function" approaches and text-linguistics which limits itself to 
text immanent data and goes beyond sentence level analysis.

 

Joseph Justiss 
                                          
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390708/direct/01/