Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Vadim Cherny <vadimcherny AT gmail.com>]

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