Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Chavoux Luyt <chavoux AT gmail.com>]

Shalom Fred
>
> Message: 21
> Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 10:32:16 -0600
> From: fred burlingame <tensorpath AT gmail.com>
<snip>
> Females (and others) today however, seem to have a different interpretation
> of these verb tenses. Rather than recounting the mother's "past" actions, in
> the week preceding shabat; the ??? ??? (e-shet ha-yil) rehearses the
> woman's actions as the "present" attributes of the mother?
>
> http://www.hillel.org/NR/rdonlyres/D8427B98-3F42-4F74-A355-AA9088FF8E15/0/eshet_chayil.pdf
>
> http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0006_0_06079.html
>
> Do you conclude that the formal and literal meaning of these verbs includes
> past tense, the above comments notwithstanding?

As I understand it, any act is either completed (perfectum - katal (&
va-yiktol in narratives in biblical Hebrew) ) or not completed
(imperfectum - yiktol (& va-katal in biblical Hebrew, but not usually
in modern Hebrew)). So even a "present" act is either complete or
incomplete  (e.g. I have heard somebody ask: "Hevanta?" (Do/did you
understand?) instead of "Atah mevin?" and the answer: "Hevanti" (I
understood/ I have understood), but in a situation where we would use
present tense (I understand - "Ani mevin") in English). Because most
past acts are complete and most future acts are incomplete, it would
appear as if the "perfectum" corresponds to "past tense" and the
"imperfectum" to "future tense", but the correspondence is not exact.
Moreover, from this perspective there is no "present tense", because
any act can be seen as either completed or incomplete. In modern
Hebrew the "infinitive" form "po'el" is usually used for present tense
(which was normally used in biblical Hebrew to indicate the one doing
the act: e.g. "Oseh Shamayim v'aretz" = Maker of heaven and earth).

BTW we learned the term "waw consecutive" instead of "waw conversive"
because it is normally used as the continuation ("and") of a narrative
instead of only as "tense converter".

To answer another question that came up on the difference between
"modern" and biblical Hebrew: I learned some "modern" Hebrew in Israel
at an ulpan before learning any "biblical" Hebrew and found that I
could read much of the Tanach (albeit very slowly). Some of the
grammar of biblical Hebrew was strange and some words were used with
"unusual" meanings, but I could understand most of it. The parts that
were very difficult for me, was the poetic language as used in the
Psalms and especially Proverbs. I am not sure if it was the grammar or
the vocabulary (or both) which made these parts so difficult to
understand.

The fact that biblical Hebrew did not use "tenses" as we know it in
European languages (and "modern" Hebrew), was one of the things I had
to get my head around when I started learning Biblical Hebrew later...
this is also where I learned the terms "perfectum" and "imperfectum".
So far this usage has seemed pretty straightforward to me in the
Bible, but this discussion have convinced me to look more closely at
this in future.

Regards
Chavoux