Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - [b-hebrew] wayyiqtol and weqatal

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Vadim Cherny <vadimcherny AT gmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] wayyiqtol and weqatal
  • Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:17:44 +0200

Dear Listmembers,

I would like to ask for your help.

Biblical Hebrew is not my day job, and I lack a degree in lexicology. Practically speaking, I cannot publish an article in scholarly press.

It seems to me that I've stumbled over a coherent and simple explanation of Hebrew tense problem:

wayyiqtol denotes deictic center shift: "And + Future Tense," "And he would say."

weqatal denotes very strong commands or predictions:
"Exclamation + Past Tense," "Have it done!" This, too, is related to deictic center shift: the author treats the command as already done.
Or, it can be highly assured predictions:
u-bircaticha - I will have you blessed (past tense verb)
weshavti - I will be settled [in the Temple]
Possibly, weqatal is also employed in prophetic narrations with deictic center shift.

I could not find any examples to contradict the above hypothesis.

The question arises, naturally, why did so many distinguished scholars miss that simple explanation? The answer, I submit, lies in linguistic mentality: deictic center shifts are uncommon in Romance and Germanic languages spoken by the majority of scholars. Strong commands using past tense are near-absent in those languages, too. Both constructs, however, are very common in Russian, which is my native language.

Would you please review the hypothesis? Any help would be deeply appreciated.

Best regards,
Vadim Cherny




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page