Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Nir cohen - Prof. Mat." <nir AT ccet.ufrn.br>]

Fred,

i do not have access to the paper suggested by bryant but i agree completely
with his comment. i would like to complete it from a slightly 
different point of view.

1. the poetic style of BH is such that USUALLY two actions in future 
or imperative tense will NOT be repeated at the same form. rather, they appear
either as a IQTOL-WEQATAL or WEQATAL-IQTOL pair, or else as 
infinitive-future, infinitive-imperative etc.

2. this has absolutely nothing to do with the two actions stemming from
similar roots or not. 

3. there are several exceptions, for example, when a SEQUENCE OF MORE THAN TWO
ACTIONS is described, in which case all of them (sometimes except the last
one) uses the same form.

you can check in the same chapter you suggested (deut 2) that most
if not all sentenses there (dealing with future or imperative) follow this
scheme. clearly, as paul indicated,
in doing so one should adopt the "natural" division into sentences, which does
not necessarily coincide with the one used today.

nir cohen


is 
Dear List,

Colleague of mine sent the article below to me from a doctoral classmate of 
his
when he was at Brandeis.

"Tense and Aspect of Hebrew Verbs in 2 Samuel 7: 8-16—from the Point of View 
of
Discourse Grammar"— by David Toshio Tsumura, Tokyo, in Vetus Testamentum 60
(2010) 641-654.

"This article is a revised version of my paper read at the Hebrew Language
session of the XVth
World Congress of Jewish Studies at Jerusalem on Aug. 6, 2009. I have received
helpful and
encouraging comments from scholars such as E. L. Greenstein, G. A. Rendsburg,
Ch. Cohen,
T. Zewi, F. Polak, T. Notarius and J. N. Ford." (Footnote 1)

The article is 14 pages and here is the abstract:
"In Nathan’s second prophetic speech (2 Sam. 7:8-16), at first the flow of
narrative discourse is
carried on by the sequence of the verbal forms qtl—wayqtl—wayqtl (vs. 8b-9a)
but, in v. 9b, the
flow is changed, if not stopped, by the sequence w-qtl . . . w-qtl . . . See 1
Sam 17:38, 2 Sam 12:16. Vs. 9b-11a is what Longacre calls a “how-it was-done”
procedural discourse and serves structurally as a transition from the Lord’s
past dealings with David in vs. 8b-9a to his future dealings with David in vs.
12-16. Thus, vs. 8b-9a conveys a past fact, and how it was done is explained
concretely by the “procedural” discourse in vs. 9b-11a. Such a
narrative-procedural discourse with the sequence of verbal forms wayqtl. . .
w-qtl can also be seen in 1 Sam 1:4, 7:15-16, 2 Sam 13:18, Job 1:5."

Rev. Bryant J. Williams III