GrayPilgrim
February 15th 2003, 10:55 PM
In this thread I wish to pursue the form and function of the Hebrew verbs, (this is an adaptation of a paper I wrote for a course entitled Advanced Hebrew Syntax. To start out I want to state that the theory defended below differs from the older/standard Verbal Aspectual Theory as most prominently advocated by S.R. Driver in his classic A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew and Some Other Syntactical Questions first publish in 1874. This theory follows the work of Wolfgang Schneider, Harald Weinrich, John Sailhamer and A.F. den Exter Blokland (my former boss). The first question I must answer is why should one abandon the older theory? To put it bluntly the aspectual theory had far too many exceptions to be a helpful or accurate description of the Hebrew Verbal System. In an attempt to classify the Hebrew verbal system, grammarians have created long lists for the exegete to scroll through to explain the usages of the w+qatal. For example, GKC lists 21 modes and Waltke & O’Connor lists twenty-five options. However, these long lists fail to take into account certain principles of language (see below).
This theory says that there are 20 distinct clause types in Biblical Hebrew. It also jettisons the old terminology as unhelpful, and instead uses formal designations. So that a “waw consecutive” is instead called a wayyiqtol (using the root qtl as paradigmatic); a “jussive becomes a yaqom, etc.
wayyiqtol
w+qatal
w+yiqtol
w+yaqom
w+qetol
w+x+qatal
w+yiqtol
w+x+yaqom
w+x+qetol
w+NC
0+qatal
0+yiqtol
0+yaqom
0+qetol
0+x+qatal
0+x+yiqtol
0+x+yaqom
0+x+qetol
0+NC
Nominative Absolute (a catch all category for the odd clause that defies categorization)
So now that we know that every clause in the Hebrew Bible can be reduced to one of these 20 categories we must now define the function of each of these different ones. At this point I will restrict myself to the w+qatal clauses excluding hyh. I will use the Pentateuch as a sample study.
A preliminary remark must be made at this point on the work of Harald Weinrich. Weinrich is a linguist and not a specialist in Hebrew. His book Tempus: Besprochene und Erzählte Welt is a study of the phenomenology of French. He discovered that when a speaker wants to communicate he actually has limited choices of verbal forms based on the format of his utterance. To use an example from German, when a person desires to tell a story in writing he must use the simple past. However, when he desires to tell the same story orally he must use the present perfect. Thus one cannot make an issue of the different tense usage in this example, rather it is a product of the means of communication. However, as language systems tend to be limited and there are nuances to speech a person orally telling a story can use a non-narrative tense to change the nuance. Spoken language and written language are significantly different from each other. Moreover, within written language different syntax is used to signify discourse (defined as reported speech) as opposed to narrative (anything not a speech act in the text). Incumbent on this view is the idea that tense forms are text syntactical markers differentiating between narrative and discourse.
Here is how it works in English in Narrative the main story uses past tense, to look back in the text will use pluperfect and to speak of the future a conditional tense will be used. In discourse, the main story will use the present tense, to look back one uses the present perfect, to look forward one will use the future tense. (I recommend you take any Novel written in English to see how this system works, you will be surprised).
In the Old Testament there are 72,594 Hebrew verbs. 6,749 are w+qatals, i.e. 8.86% of all Hebrew verb forms in the MT. The interpretation of the w+qatal has long been one of the most nettlesome issues of the complex verbal system. One of the major difficulties is the paucity of occurrences. Of the 6,749 weqatals in the Masoretic Text (MT) only 394 of which occur in narrative texts (I went through all 6,749 to discover this). Of the 2,570 that occur in the Pentateuch only 57 are in narrative passages. Following from this presupposition is the principle that certain tenses prefer narrative over discourse and vice versa. At this point one should note that nearly 94% of weqatals occur in discursive texts, leaving only 6% in narrative texts (98% to 2% in the Pentateuch which makes up 38% of the occurrences of w+qatal in the MT). Their rarity in narrative texts indicates that something different is being communicated. This leads one to wonder, what is an apparently discursive tense doing in a narrative passage?
I examined the 58 weqatals in the narrative segments of the Pentateuch on semantic grounds to ascertain their function. The examination of these verbs in the Pentateuch led me to divide them into three modes: non-modal, procedural and modal.
There were five instances of the non-modal mode in the Pentateuch, Gen 15:6, 21:25, 28:6, 34:5, 37:3. This mode seems to be used for emphasis at a turning point in a narrative [There does not appear to be one consistent formal feature to designate this usage, but one needs to investigate the narrative weqatals in the Prophets and Writings to see as the current data set is too small to tell. (They follow a discourse and 0+x+qatal and two of them follow w+x+qatal.)] and the introduction of subsequent events (Abraham believed God, the oath at Beersheba, Esau’s marriage to an Ishmaelite, the destruction of Shechem, and the Joseph cycle, respectively). These five clauses have a disjunctive quality and adhere to the subsequent text. These clauses are best understood as one time events with special importance to the flow of the narrative, whereas the other two clause types signify repeated events. It would be necessary to study the occurrences of this phenomenon in the rest of the MT before drawing a final conclusion concerning this text syntactical category.
The procedural usage occurs 23 times in the Pentateuch. Gen 2:6 (1 weqatal), Gen 29:3 (4 weqatals), Exo 37:7-11 (11 weqatals), Exo 34:34-5 (4 weqatals). As an aside, there is ambiguity as to whether the procedural should be considered its own mode or a subset of the modal mode. I chose to separate it because it has formal categories. This mode has two distinct formal features that distinguish it from the modal. First, there is a yiqtol in a preceding clause. While they are normally in the same verse, in 29:3 it is in the first half of the preceding verse. Second, there is generally a chain of weqatals, with Genesis 2:6 being the only occurrence with no chain. The procedural mode indicates the manner in which things used to occur, e.g. in Exodus 33:7-11 we see the manner in which Moses and the Children of Israel would set up camp. For further examples outside the Pentateuch see Bruce Longacre “Weqatal Forms in Biblical Hebrew Prose,” in Biblical Hebrew and Discourse Linguistics. ed. Robert Bergen. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994.
The modal/frequentive usage occurs 33 times. This mode has no formal characteristics to distinguish it. There are a few occurrences in Exodus and Numbers that approximate the chain feature of the procedural mode; however they do not have an introductory yiqtol. As in the procedural mode, this mode often indicates the repeated/habitual practice of the actant, e.g. when Jacob would place the sticks in the water for the healthy goats (Gen 30:41). While it may seem arbitrary to place a verse like this here as opposed to in the procedural there is no antecedent yiqtol or weqatal chain, so it fails to meet either of the formal criterion for a procedural mode. A further characteristic of the modal/frequentive, as well as the procedural, is that it adheres to the preceding clauses as opposed to the subsequent clauses.
The procedural mode provides a good illustration of the tense metaphor of the weqatal in narrative segments. Longacre indicates that in a discursive text when one uses a yiqtol followed by a weqatal chain that it is a procedural mode in its non-metaphorical setting. He labels this construction in discourse a “How-To-Do-It” construction and uses Leviticus 4:2-12 as an example. In this passage God gave instructions to Israel on how to make a sacrifice if one sinned inadvertently. This passage has 13 weqatals preceded by a yiqtol indicating that it is a procedural construction. We see that in this text the procedural construction has a hortatory nature and thus Longacre’s label, “How-To-Do-It”. Now that we see how this construction functions in a discursive text, which is its natural setting, let us look again at the example given above, Exo. 33:7-14, to see its use as a tense metaphor. In this segment we see an initial yiqtol clause followed by 14 weqatals. As opposed to having a hortatory nature as above, here it has a “How-It-Was-Done” function. In Longacre (1994:60ff), he commented on this same phenomenon in other languages as well, i.e. Camsa, Halbi and Ténhé, in these three languages a discursive hortatory construction is used with a “How-It-Was-Done” function in a narrative.
Well that is a rough intro to a text-linguistic approach to the Hebrew Verbal System.
GP
This theory says that there are 20 distinct clause types in Biblical Hebrew. It also jettisons the old terminology as unhelpful, and instead uses formal designations. So that a “waw consecutive” is instead called a wayyiqtol (using the root qtl as paradigmatic); a “jussive becomes a yaqom, etc.
wayyiqtol
w+qatal
w+yiqtol
w+yaqom
w+qetol
w+x+qatal
w+yiqtol
w+x+yaqom
w+x+qetol
w+NC
0+qatal
0+yiqtol
0+yaqom
0+qetol
0+x+qatal
0+x+yiqtol
0+x+yaqom
0+x+qetol
0+NC
Nominative Absolute (a catch all category for the odd clause that defies categorization)
So now that we know that every clause in the Hebrew Bible can be reduced to one of these 20 categories we must now define the function of each of these different ones. At this point I will restrict myself to the w+qatal clauses excluding hyh. I will use the Pentateuch as a sample study.
A preliminary remark must be made at this point on the work of Harald Weinrich. Weinrich is a linguist and not a specialist in Hebrew. His book Tempus: Besprochene und Erzählte Welt is a study of the phenomenology of French. He discovered that when a speaker wants to communicate he actually has limited choices of verbal forms based on the format of his utterance. To use an example from German, when a person desires to tell a story in writing he must use the simple past. However, when he desires to tell the same story orally he must use the present perfect. Thus one cannot make an issue of the different tense usage in this example, rather it is a product of the means of communication. However, as language systems tend to be limited and there are nuances to speech a person orally telling a story can use a non-narrative tense to change the nuance. Spoken language and written language are significantly different from each other. Moreover, within written language different syntax is used to signify discourse (defined as reported speech) as opposed to narrative (anything not a speech act in the text). Incumbent on this view is the idea that tense forms are text syntactical markers differentiating between narrative and discourse.
Here is how it works in English in Narrative the main story uses past tense, to look back in the text will use pluperfect and to speak of the future a conditional tense will be used. In discourse, the main story will use the present tense, to look back one uses the present perfect, to look forward one will use the future tense. (I recommend you take any Novel written in English to see how this system works, you will be surprised).
In the Old Testament there are 72,594 Hebrew verbs. 6,749 are w+qatals, i.e. 8.86% of all Hebrew verb forms in the MT. The interpretation of the w+qatal has long been one of the most nettlesome issues of the complex verbal system. One of the major difficulties is the paucity of occurrences. Of the 6,749 weqatals in the Masoretic Text (MT) only 394 of which occur in narrative texts (I went through all 6,749 to discover this). Of the 2,570 that occur in the Pentateuch only 57 are in narrative passages. Following from this presupposition is the principle that certain tenses prefer narrative over discourse and vice versa. At this point one should note that nearly 94% of weqatals occur in discursive texts, leaving only 6% in narrative texts (98% to 2% in the Pentateuch which makes up 38% of the occurrences of w+qatal in the MT). Their rarity in narrative texts indicates that something different is being communicated. This leads one to wonder, what is an apparently discursive tense doing in a narrative passage?
I examined the 58 weqatals in the narrative segments of the Pentateuch on semantic grounds to ascertain their function. The examination of these verbs in the Pentateuch led me to divide them into three modes: non-modal, procedural and modal.
There were five instances of the non-modal mode in the Pentateuch, Gen 15:6, 21:25, 28:6, 34:5, 37:3. This mode seems to be used for emphasis at a turning point in a narrative [There does not appear to be one consistent formal feature to designate this usage, but one needs to investigate the narrative weqatals in the Prophets and Writings to see as the current data set is too small to tell. (They follow a discourse and 0+x+qatal and two of them follow w+x+qatal.)] and the introduction of subsequent events (Abraham believed God, the oath at Beersheba, Esau’s marriage to an Ishmaelite, the destruction of Shechem, and the Joseph cycle, respectively). These five clauses have a disjunctive quality and adhere to the subsequent text. These clauses are best understood as one time events with special importance to the flow of the narrative, whereas the other two clause types signify repeated events. It would be necessary to study the occurrences of this phenomenon in the rest of the MT before drawing a final conclusion concerning this text syntactical category.
The procedural usage occurs 23 times in the Pentateuch. Gen 2:6 (1 weqatal), Gen 29:3 (4 weqatals), Exo 37:7-11 (11 weqatals), Exo 34:34-5 (4 weqatals). As an aside, there is ambiguity as to whether the procedural should be considered its own mode or a subset of the modal mode. I chose to separate it because it has formal categories. This mode has two distinct formal features that distinguish it from the modal. First, there is a yiqtol in a preceding clause. While they are normally in the same verse, in 29:3 it is in the first half of the preceding verse. Second, there is generally a chain of weqatals, with Genesis 2:6 being the only occurrence with no chain. The procedural mode indicates the manner in which things used to occur, e.g. in Exodus 33:7-11 we see the manner in which Moses and the Children of Israel would set up camp. For further examples outside the Pentateuch see Bruce Longacre “Weqatal Forms in Biblical Hebrew Prose,” in Biblical Hebrew and Discourse Linguistics. ed. Robert Bergen. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994.
The modal/frequentive usage occurs 33 times. This mode has no formal characteristics to distinguish it. There are a few occurrences in Exodus and Numbers that approximate the chain feature of the procedural mode; however they do not have an introductory yiqtol. As in the procedural mode, this mode often indicates the repeated/habitual practice of the actant, e.g. when Jacob would place the sticks in the water for the healthy goats (Gen 30:41). While it may seem arbitrary to place a verse like this here as opposed to in the procedural there is no antecedent yiqtol or weqatal chain, so it fails to meet either of the formal criterion for a procedural mode. A further characteristic of the modal/frequentive, as well as the procedural, is that it adheres to the preceding clauses as opposed to the subsequent clauses.
The procedural mode provides a good illustration of the tense metaphor of the weqatal in narrative segments. Longacre indicates that in a discursive text when one uses a yiqtol followed by a weqatal chain that it is a procedural mode in its non-metaphorical setting. He labels this construction in discourse a “How-To-Do-It” construction and uses Leviticus 4:2-12 as an example. In this passage God gave instructions to Israel on how to make a sacrifice if one sinned inadvertently. This passage has 13 weqatals preceded by a yiqtol indicating that it is a procedural construction. We see that in this text the procedural construction has a hortatory nature and thus Longacre’s label, “How-To-Do-It”. Now that we see how this construction functions in a discursive text, which is its natural setting, let us look again at the example given above, Exo. 33:7-14, to see its use as a tense metaphor. In this segment we see an initial yiqtol clause followed by 14 weqatals. As opposed to having a hortatory nature as above, here it has a “How-It-Was-Done” function. In Longacre (1994:60ff), he commented on this same phenomenon in other languages as well, i.e. Camsa, Halbi and Ténhé, in these three languages a discursive hortatory construction is used with a “How-It-Was-Done” function in a narrative.
Well that is a rough intro to a text-linguistic approach to the Hebrew Verbal System.
GP