What I was looking for was quoted spoken Hebrew, quoted conversations. Written literary Hebrew is more complex. Poetry much more complex. Secondly it was to answer, for myself at least, which is the most common verbal form relating to present action. In modern Israeli Hebrew, I’ve been told that the participle serves as the present tense marker: but in Biblical Hebrew the participle is used for future and past actions as well, therefore it was not a tense marker for Biblical Hebrew.Jason Hare wrote: ↑Thu Sep 15, 2022 7:28 am
I’ve become convinced, against popular opinion, that the unmarked word order of biblical Hebrew was subject-verb-object (SVO). Robert Holmstedt has written several articles relating to word order that have me convinced. I’m glad that we seem to have agreement on that question.
I don’t know if SVO is the right designation. It seems to have operated like German, in which the verb occupies second position. First position is naturally occupied by the subject, but if something else is fronted for whatever reason, then the subject drops behind the verb. It could be a temporal statement, the vav-prefix used for the narrative past (vayyiqtol), a fronted object, etc. Whatever it is, it displaces the subject and causes it to drop lower in the structure. Modals of volition (jussives, cohortatives, imperatives) take precedence and are themselves fronted and then followed by the subject.
I was looking only for present action sentences, which rules out modals of volition which refer to a future action.
What I found is a S-V-O sentence structure.
The verb is a Qatal Qal. Because of what I was taught in class, I had expected to find Yiqtol verbs.
Karl W. Randolph.