...Are you trying to argue here that because the Masoretes did not invent the semantic distinction (agreed by all, I think), it was therefore invented by later grammarians? That is of course a fallacious argument as it does not exclude a third possibility. The position of most scholars today is that the distinction dates from before the Masoretes, by many centuries, and your argument has nothing to say against that position.
The Masoretes did not, as I see it, introduce any new concepts. They tried to translate what they heard in the synagogue as faithfully as the could, and they would not dream of introducing anything new semantically speaking. Therefore I do not think that the distinction they made between WAYYIQTOL and WEYIQTOL is semantic any more than the gemination after the article and non-gemination after the interrogative particle H is semantic. But later grammarians took the mentioned verb distinction as Semantics, and the four conjugations were born.
Here is one: W)(&H (we 'a`ase) Exodus 32:10, Num 14:12, Deut 9:14, 1 Samuel 20:4 (and other cases which are cohortative) vs. W)(& (wa'a`as) Deut 10:3, Ezekiel 12:7, 20:9,22, 24:18. (And yes, the longer form does seem to have a past meaning in Ezk 20:14, Dan 8:27.)
And does it not follow that the disctinction between vayyiqtol and
veyiqtol predates the earliest MT copies we have?
If you give me examples of such a distinction from pre-Masoretic time I will use them in my thesis. I am not aware of any such.
... By studying different Bible translations, the scholar will see that the translators are heavily influenced by the traditional views of the Hebrew verbs, which in a way serves as a straitjacket. I will estimate that if the model of my thesis was used instead of the traditional one, that would necessitate a change in the English tenses of more than ten thousand verbs, and many, many other changes would be necessary as well. So our view of verbs does have consequences.These consequences give us the possibility to test your hypothesis. At least, I presume that there would be similar distinctions between translations according to the two models in translations into other languages, including Greek (several times), Latin, Syriac and Aramaic. The Hebrew Bible was translated directly (although not always entirely independently) into at least these four languages long before the time of the Masoretes. If we can find examples in any of these translations, especially in the more literal ones, in which WAYYIQTOL and WEYIQTOL are rendered differently, that would indicate that there was a pre-Masoretic distinction.
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