Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Paul Zellmer" <pzellmer AT sc.rr.com>]

You have been pointed to the field of study that answers your question.  
Please check it out.  You may not agree with its conclusions, but at least 
you will not be asking the same question over and over again.

 

Oh, and for a dissenting view discussed ad nauseum, you might check the 
archives for Rolf Furuli’s posts when he was actively developing his analysis 
of the wayyiqtol-weyiqtol in the Tanach.               

 

Paul Zellmer

 

From: fred burlingame [mailto:tensorpath AT gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2011 12:07 PM
To: Paul Zellmer
Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] language level

 

Hello Paul:

 

Thanks for your helpful comments.

 

It sounds to me like the "conversation" or "discourse" or "context" 
surrounding the verb, dictates the tense and aspect of the verb. And that 
sounds reasonable.

 

But ..... if so, why the existence; why the need; for two large and different 
sets of verb forms: 

 

a. yiqtol; and

 

b. qatal.

 

Somehow, I cannot believe that level of redundancy or inefficiency became 
injected into the hebrew language.

 

regards,

 

fred burlingame

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 7:04 AM, Paul Zellmer <pzellmer AT sc.rr.com> wrote:

Fred,

I accidentally permanently deleted your last response.  But you were asking 
about the yiqtol (actually X-yiqtol, which indicates that the verb is not the 
first element of the clause) as compared to the weqatal occurring later in 
Deut 2:25 and which happened to enjoy the same remaining root letters as was 
found in the yiqtol.

Realize that, although both occur in the same verse by the modern 
enumeration, the verbs occur in two different statements.  We do not have 
here a straight narrative, rather, the verse is part of an embedded 
discourse.  And discourse in any language is normally made of short clauses 
or groups of clauses.  The second statement starts with שמעך--he hears (of) 
you and continues with two weqatals.  The three verbs make a group of actions 
that are related to each other and says nothing about their relative timing 
of occurrence.  The only way we know that the actions are future is from the 
context surrounding the group, which happens to be predictive.  It is this 
predictive quality that was marked by the X-yiqtol, the form of the first 
verb in your question.

This is probably as clear as mud to you.  You really need to do some research 
in discourse analysis to find out why these forms were purposeful selections. 
 I already referred you to Bryan Rocine's grammar.

Paul Zellmer