Why read footnotes? Because you will often find very noteworthy tidbits there that can be worth the entire price of admission. I found just such a one hiding in Randall Buth’s article “Hebrew Poetic Tenses and the Magnificat.” I would encourage you to read this especially if you only know Greek. Pay close attention to his description of the interplay among the forms, the way they operate interdependently to form the system. I wish I had heard this in class first year.
‘Tense’ is used loosely in this paper, when applied to Semitic verbs, to specify a verb form, which refers semantically to a temporal-aspectual composite. A brief listing of biblical Hebrew basic verb-forms and common functions may help explain this composite and serve as a review for those unacquainted with some developments in Hebrew grammar or linguistics of the last 20 years. Hebrew has four (or five) basic verb tenses, suffix (qatál), prefix (yiqtól), vav hahipuk prefix (vayyiqtol), vav hahipuk suffix (veqataltí) and a participle (qotél). These terms do not refer exclusively to temporal or aspectual or modal distinctions. Instead, these five forms (morphological-syntactical classes) are used in various syntactic arrangements to make semantic distinctions of time, aspect and mood in the referential world. They also function within narrative and other genres to help mark discourse parameters and structures. (This last function is not made explicit in most published studies of Hebrew but it is obvious to those acquainted with recent developments in linguistics and discourse studies.)
Qatál is normally used for whole, completed events in the past though also for situations (including mental states) that have validity in the present. In narrative, qatál is used with Subject-Verb word order for events which do not advance the time reference of the story (e.g. in simultaneous time frames, in back reference [=pluperfect; cf. Jon. 1:5], and in boundaries of units [e.g. paragraph, episode]).
Vayyiqtol is used for the same semantic distinctions as qatál but differs pragmatically and is used for thematic, time-advancing events of a narrative. Diachronically, it is a remnant from a West-Semitic past tense *yaqtul (parallel to Akkadian iprus).
Yiqtól, the descendent of West-Semitic *yaqtulu, generally serves as a present-future tense and as a habitual aspect in the past. Rarely, it can refer to an event in the past as a single, complete whole, either as an archaic *yaqtul verb or as a ‘historic present’.
Veqatalti serves as a present-future tense and past habitual aspect in theme advancing clauses.
Qotél may be thought of as a verbal adjective, often describing a noun as the doer of certain actions (habitual). In many lexical items it may function as a present tense. This second use expanded diachronically to produce the present-future of Mishnaic-Hebrew.1
Notice how he does not say much about translation value, instead focusing on describing the role it plays in discourse. He provides flexible principles, ones that will not be specific enough for some, but ones that might actually be more useful in practice than in theory. Oh, to move in this direction in Greek!
- Pp. 240-56 in Stanley E. Porter and Craig A. Evans, vol. 44, New Testament Text and Language (The Biblical Seminar; A Sheffield Reader Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 240. [↩]
Steve, thanks for posting this. It is a clear and quick presentation. I have already sent it to my beginning Hebrew students.
[…] In terms of grammar, his discussion of individual words includes syntax and morphology, with every single word parsed / morphologically analyzed and often more detail than that. Eddinger uses the qatal and yiqtol verb classification system. This may not line up with what every Hebrew student has read regarding tense/aspect in their first-year Hebrew class, but it does (at least according to some) carry significant advantages over “perfect” and “imperfect.” (See a mini-primer on the Hebrew verbal system here.) […]