Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

dear rolf,

i repeat (and complete) a mesage that did not go through.

looking at just the first page of the great isaiah scroll i found two
wayiqtol forms which are clearly consecutive and inverted, and not merely
conjunctive. i refer to the wayiqtols in Isa 1:19,20. i did not 
look further but i guess there are many more examples. so it seems 
that your categoric statements below are not precise, at least
from the SEMANTIC point of view.

as to the gemination, patah etc, they are not marked in the DSS at all
and so i do not see your point. clearly PHONOLOGICALLY speaking we do
not know if the vav on wayiqtol was biblically different from the vav 
on weyiqtol; but SEMANTICALLY we can distinguish in "wyyqtol" two 
clearly distinct uses, denoted later by masorah as wayiqtol and 
weyiqtol. even here, there is enough material in the OT itself 
(short/long) to suspect the MORPHOLOGIES of the two were not identical, 
even if the same phonological vav was used. in some places (e.g. 
pausal end) it seems that even differences in stress (milra/milel) 
can be discerned in the biblical text.

nir cohen


>>>> What do a morphological study of the DSS reveal? About 500 prefix forms
with prefixed WAW. These forms are not geminated and the vowel patah is not
represented by the maters lexiones. This justifies my  statement that "the
WAYYIQTOL form was not known in the DSS"—only YIQTOLs with prefixed WAW. The
data I presented from Origen and the Samaritan Penbtateuch justify my claim
that "the WAYYIQTOL was not known before the middle of the first millennium
CE." The only way to show that this is "a gross misstatement" is to refer to
manuscripts where the WAYYIQTOL is found. This is a challenge to you.