B-Hebrew: The Biblical Hebrew Forum

The form of the verb is dependent on what is being spoken of. It doesn't center itself on the time of the audience's hearing the communication.

We're talking about the mapping of tense into verb forms

You're talking about the forms and identification of person-gender-number agreement.

The forms don't change, no matter how one interprets temporality in specific verbs

You haven't added anything to the discussion because form isn't relevant.

Jonathan Beck wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 2:24 pm

talmid56 wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 10:28 am In other words, the time relation of the verb form is determined by context, not by any marker in the verb form itself. Right?

Well, except for the wayyiqtol form. But I know Karl will disagree with me on this.

90% of the time, it's a Past Narrative form. That's a pretty solid percentage.

Jonathan Beck wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 12:20 pm Can you give an example of a wayyiqtol that is not past tense?

The identification of wayyiqtol as a past (tense) narrative conjugation appears prima facie quite straightforward. In anyone’s statistical count, well over 90% of the more than 15,000 occurrences of the form in BH appear in prose narrative with past temporality. The relatively few uniform functions assigned to wayyiqtol in the standard grammars are in line with these statistics: (1) simple past (usually with the idea of succession); (2) present perfect and past perfect (the latter under restricted circumstances); (3) logical consecution (past or present time), (4) some exceptional (apparently) future uses in prophetic contexts (Bergsträsser 1962: 2.36–45; Davidson 1901: 70–78; S. R. Driver 1998: 70–99; Gibson 1994: 95–102; Joüon 1993: 389–96; Kautzsch 1910: 326–30; Meyer 1992: 2.44–46; Waltke and O’Connor 1990: 543–63).

[source: John A. Cook, Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew, ed. Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé and Jacobus Naudé, vol. 7, Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 256–257.]

Rather, the usual explanation now is that two prefix conjugations, which were originally distinct because of the presence of a final vowel on the one (i.e., *yaqtul versus *yaqtulu), partially merged morphologically through the loss of final short vowels (see §2.3 for the full comparative-historical argument). In BH, reflexes of the short *yaqtul form appear in the Jussive and the wayyiqtol, while the long *yaqtulu form is realized in yiqtol. This explanation accounts for the long-observed morphological parallel between the Jussive and wayyiqtol, wherein they both exhibit the same apocopated pattern when possible (see discussion of Jussive and prefix pattern in Kummerow 2007a). The question of the relationship between the Jussive and wayyiqtol reflexes of *yaqtul (i.e., whether there are two homonymous *yaqtul forms or a single polysemous form; Huehnergard 1988: 20) seems both intractable and moot—intractable inasmuch as no clear diachrony between the two reflexes can reasonably be posited given their distinct semantic contrast; and moot, in that, given the wide semantic discrepancy between the reflexes in BH, there is no risk of confusing the forms.

[source: John A. Cook, Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew, ed. Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé and Jacobus Naudé, vol. 7, Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 257.]

Isaac Fried wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 7:02 pm I am sorry, but there is no such thing as "the mapping of tense into verb forms". Tense is not "mapped". Never.

Unlike modern Israeli Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew had no tenses.

Isaac Fried wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 3:47 pm Karl writes

Unlike modern Israeli Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew had no tenses.

I am afraid that this, often repeated, statement is both wrong and misleading.
A language is said to have tense if different forms (in Hebrew: the root augmented by differently distributed personal pronouns) of the same verb are selected to be used, one for a deed done and another for a deed still contemplated. In this sense both Biblical Hebrew and spoken Hebrew, both sharing the same verbal forms, have both tense.
However, the speaker may forgo the use of the expected verbal form if the time of the action is otherwise evident from the context.
Because it is spoken and practical, present day Hebrew is more careful about assigning a time to the action.

Isaac Fried, Boston University
www.hebrewetymology.com