What then is the basic organising principle behind Hebrew verbs? There must
be some difference between Qatal and Yiqtol, etc, or why have them? Tense
is not necessary, but something must distinguish the various forms.
Kevin Riley
-----Original Message----->future). In some cases the translators are simply forced to violate
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org]On Behalf Of furuli AT online.no
Dear Harold,
I am not a native speaker of English, and I realize that you are in a
much better position than I to judge stylistic matters in connection
with the NIV and other English translations. My criticism does not
relate to matters of style or smoothness but to matters of grammar
and syntax. You are of course correct in your description of how past
English verbs can be used for future events. My concern is the
*basis* for the translators' use of past verbs to signal an event
that is past in relation to another future event.
My impression is that modern Bible translators generally build on a
faulty view of Hebrew grammar (e.g. QATAL should not express simple
>their own grammatical rules (e.g. some QATALs are rendered by simple
>future in Jer 51, 52 by NIV), but in most cases they follow their
erroneous rules. This sometimes leads to confusion on the part of>YIQTOLs, 5 WEYIQTOLs with past reference. In these verses it is
the readers.
Anyone who wants to test my claim can simply do an extensive reading
of the prophets, and see how many accounts that has a clear time
reference. For example, the locust plague and the other plagues of
Joel 1, the judgements of Zecheariah 9 and Nahum 1 and 2, do
translations show they are past or future? I accept that translators
can render passages which are ambiguous in an ambiguous way, but it
is bad if this is done on the basis of a wrong understanding of
Hebrew grammar.
I am in no way certain that the NIV translators translated the QATALs
of Jeremiah 50, 51 differently as to time reference because they did
not want to loose "the variation that the Hebrew itself has". I
rather think it is based on their grammatical views. In Psalm
107:3-41 the NIV renders most of the 25 WAYYIQTOLS, 12 QATALs, 22
difficult to view the different verb forms as having different time>University of Oslo
references, so all are given the same tense. Where is the Hebrew
variation?
Best regards
Rolf
Rolf Furuli
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