Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

fred,

On Tue, 1 Feb 2011 00:37:11 -0600, fred burlingame wrote
> If only you could give as simple and reasonable an explanation for the 
> reason for the existence of yiqtol and qatal verb forms in the masoretic 
> text ... :)

if your question is: "why they choose this form here and that form there", 
the answer is:

i dont know since both forms look identical (etymologically) to me, unlike 
piel and paal.
probably they looked identical even at the time, so both were used 
interchangeably.

is your question is  "why are there two forms of future in BH 
and related dialects like moabite, to begin with"? the answer is:

i dont know. i can provide two speculations:

1) two distinct forms at some very ancient time which by the 1st millenium bc 
became completely 
synonymous and interchangeable. then later onthe more cumbersome form in each 
pair disappeared 
through redundancy.

2) the WAYQTOL and WEQATAL forms were invented expressly for poetical 
reasons, based on the QATAL
and YQTOL form. when people becams too sad to write poems, these new forms 
were abandoned.

as the physicists say, the past is as difficult to fathom as the future.
 
nir cohen