Jason Hare wrote:kwrandolph wrote:Do you realize that when you claimed that the grammars of modern Israeli Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew are the same, that that is evidence that you don’t know what you’re talking about? And that is just one of the indications that you don’t know Biblical Hebrew?
I first learned biblical Hebrew, using Seow's grammar.
Dear Jason:
This takes a more involved answer than my previous one.
When I studied Biblical Hebrew, or what was then called “Biblical Hebrew”, the majority belief was that Tiberian Hebrew = Biblical Hebrew. Tiberian Hebrew is the ancestor to modern Israeli Hebrew and the grammars of the two are virtually identical. The biggest difference between Tiberian / modern Israeli Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew is the grammatical treatment of verbs.
There is disagreement between scholars as to what constitutes Biblical Hebrew. We had one poster on this list years ago who claimed that without the Masoretic points, one does not have Biblical Hebrew. Most scholars don’t go that far.
In Tiberian Hebrew, the verbal conjugations code for tense: Qatal is past tense, Yiqtol future tense and participle present tense. According to Waltke and O’Connor, that treatment of verbs was already practiced in the non-Biblical writings among the DSS. That’s how verbs were used in Mishnaic Hebrew. I’ve been told that that’s the practice in modern, Israeli Hebrew. There are still professors who teach that the grammatical use of verbs is the same in both Tiberian and Biblical Hebrew. I don’t know about Seow, is he one of those?
Even as I studied Hebrew, there were researchers who claimed that Biblical Hebrew conjugations did not code for tense. A later example is Dr. Rolf Furuli, who in his PhD dissertation shows that the conjugations don’t code for tense in Biblical Hebrew. For example, the majority of spoken sentences recorded in the narrative books where the person mentions something he is doing even as he speaks, the majority of such sentences consist of a subject, usually a pronoun, verb in Qatal, then object. I tried reading Tanakh consistently using the Tiberian verbal schema, and I couldn’t.
The early people who questioned if Tiberian Hebrew is the same as Biblical Hebrew, proposed that the conjugations code for aspect. The definition for aspect that they used is the same as what I learned when I studied linguistics and is found on the SIL site in their grammar reference section. This is where we get the perfect/imperfect, perfective/imperfective references to Qatal/Yiqtol. But that doesn’t work either, so rather than giving up on claiming that the conjugations code for aspect, they now redefine “aspect” is ways that I don’t recognize.
A good example of a passage that fits neither tense nor aspect, is Proverbs 31:10–31 where all the verbs, a mixture of Qatals and Yiqtols all refer to present, continuous action.
Another option is that the verbal conjugations are modal, but that the moods are not all the same as in English. This understanding was apparently first proposed by Dr. Diethelm Michel at Mainz University, though I came to a similar conclusion independent of him. I have yet to read anything by Dr. Michel, but another visiter to this site claims that it’s basically the same.
Jason Hare wrote:In my experience, the only people who claim that biblical and modern Hebrew are so widely divergent are those who don't know both languages.
Seeing as I originally learned Tiberian Hebrew, which is the ancestor of modern Israeli Hebrew, I should have some understanding of at least the grammar of modern Hebrew. It is on that basis that I say that they are quite different.
Jason Hare wrote:… but narrative is very easy to read if you recognize the use of vav-consecutives, infinitive constructs (which are sometimes employed in modern speech) and infinitive absolutes (which really have no place in the modern language). This is syntax rather than grammar.
These features are grammar, especially the so-called “waw-consecutives”. Some of the other features exist only as Masoretic points and would not be recognized apart from those points.
The waw-consecutive, for example, is based on a misunderstanding of Biblical Hebrew grammar. The Yiqtol, when used in the indicative mood, refers to a continuing or addition to the main idea, usually but not always preceded by a waw. In narration, it’s used to pull the narration along — this happened then that happened and t’other thing happened — and so forth.
Jason Hare wrote:Thus, בקומך is easily transferred into the modern tongue as כשאתה קם. All of the pieces of the latter (כשאתה קם) are available in biblical Hebrew, but the syntax is altered in modern Hebrew so that בקומך sounds antiquated, though it is technically still correct. קם is used as a present participle in the biblical tongue, כש־ is an abbreviation of כאשר that appears in the Bible, and אתה is obviously the 2ms personal pronoun. All of the pieces exist as part of the lexicon and grammar of biblical Hebrew, but the way that they are put together (the syntax) is different.
If I tried to read modern Israeli Hebrew and saw this example, I would have no idea what it meant. בקומך is a noun, meaning “in your rising up” a description of an action which could have happened in the past, is presently going on, or will happen in the future. From your description, the modern phrase has a different meaning.
The participle in Biblical Hebrew is used for events that have happened in the past, as well as events that will happen in the future. In modern Israeli Hebrew it is used as a present tense verb, as a sign of the present and only the present. That alone is a significant grammatical difference.
Jason Hare wrote:Biblical and modern Hebrew are the same language, with varying expression (whether this is through syntactic relation or through an expanded lexicon). In my experience, anyone who speaks Hebrew and spends time reading the Bible agrees with this.
Seeing as I was trained in the ancestor of modern Hebrew, and ended up having to reject what I was taught because of reading the Bible, would I be an exception to what you just wrote?
Karl W. Randolph.