Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

>Genesis 1:3 “and there was light (light came into existence)” yiqtol.

wyhy is not a yiqtol. That would have been (w) yhyh

The west-Semitic languages show a distinction
between two/three morphologies of prefix verbs. The MT consonants
are not 100% reliable on this, but close enough to show that the
system recorded by the MT existed.


>> Rolf Furuli
>>
> I would not be surprised if a graduate student were to do the same
> statistical analysis as you did for your dissertation, but instead of
> focusing on tense as you did, focus on aspect, that he would find that
> aspect is not grammaticalized just as tense is not grammaticalized.

Yes. You would be correct. The same thing happens in Greek.
The Porter crowd points to the 'historical present' as an
unnecessary problem, without bothering to notice that 'historical
presents' tend to be in opening settings with strings of events
that quite often have one completed event after another, counter
their theory.

Another problem is that 'aspect' is ultimately subjective, it is
the writer's presentations of a situation, so people can twist
things into all sorts of things.

Most Semitists view the wayyiqtol structure as a perfective,
among other things, and not as an imperfective. They are correct, in
my view, as far as they go. The LXX, targumim, Syriac, and MT are
quite clear on this when taken as a whole. But someone like
Barnes in '65 or R. Young in the 19th century can claim to
read everything as 'vivid present'. They can. But it wasn't
Hebrew, they were just talking to themselves.


-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
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