Bryan, may I pick up a point from your correspondence with Vince?
>My first reservation would be in thinking of HYH as a be-verb. I don't
>think it is. I think it means "become,happen" so that hayu kotevim means
>they had become writers. ...
> I think HYH is closer to Gr ginomai than eimi.
> On the one hand, vayehi hebel ro`eh tso'n has little to do with
> whether Abel is actually doing shepherding during the story time. It is
> only saying that he came into that occupation.
What do you do with qatal and wayyiqtol forms of HYH such as:
Gen 1:2 'the earth HAD BECOME a formless void'?
Gen 2:25 'they both HAD BECOME naked'?
Exod 24:18 'Moses took forty days and nights to get onto the mountain'?
Forgive the absurd examples, but wouldn't it really be better to see HYH as
a stative verb which becomes ingressive in a punctual context?