An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

concrete nouns, represented the past tense, and that yqtl, formed on the abstract
infinitive, signified the present tense. 27 Like Schröder he thought the wayyqtl signified
relative time,[Page 461] but he defined it differently. For him the form worked like
the historical present tense encountered in Greek and Latin, where the present tense is
used to refer to a past situation. 28 A simple English example would be: ‘I was sitting
on the veranda when up comes John and says…’ This offers a more vivid narrative
than ‘I was sitting on the veranda when up came Kathy and said…’ A relative present
in the wayyqtl construction fits his theory nicely, for he did not distinguish the
meaning of yqtl in its free form from its bound one with waw-relative.
k Lee’s work must be judged revolutionary. He first moved scholarship away from the
venerable tradition that yqtl signifies only the present-future tense. His morphological
analysis of the conjugations into affixes and nominal roots is foundational for the later
comparative-historical approach. In fact, some comparative Semitists still support his
theory that the yqtl form is based on the infinitive. 29 His distinction between concrete
and abstract actions looks forward to Diethelm Michel’s distinction between
accidental and substantial actions. Although he challenged the tradition, in fact he
merely substituted one notion of tense for another, and no view based exclusively on
tense is adequate. In a way this failure is surprising since Lee recognized that what he
called Oriental thought differed from Occidental.
29.3 Elementary Aspect Theories
a Given the defects of theories based on tense, it is not surprising that scholars looked
to other explanatory factors, which may be grouped together under the heading of
aspect. In addition to the strictly aspectual views of Heinrich Ewald and William
Turner, we consider the “universal tense” theory as an aspectual theory by default.
b The “universal tense” theory, which has surely been held briefly by every student of
elementary Biblical Hebrew, alleges that the two conjugations cannot strictly be
separated. The great German romantic critic Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–
1803) was one of the first modern appreciators of Hebrew literature. In his book Vom
Geist der Ebräischen Poesie (On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 1783), he suggested
that Hebrew had only one tense, or rather that the two tenses are essentially undefined
27
McFall, Hebrew Verbal System, 28–37.
28
Latin “perfectum historicum”; cf. GKC §111a / p. 326. See Zevit’s paper cited in n.
73 for a similar view.
29
His idea that the qtl form is based on concrete nouns must be seen in light of the
Akkadian permansive or stative form; cf. W. von Soden, Grundriss der akkadischen
Grammatik (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1969) 100–101; G. R. Driver,
Problems of the Hebrew Verbal System (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936) 11, 17, 20,
22, 26; C. Brockelmann, “Die ‘Tempora’ des Semitischen,” Zeitschrift für Phonetik
und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft 5 (1951) 133–54, esp. 140–44; G. Buccellati, “An
Interpretation of the Akkadian Stative as a Nominal Sentence,” Journal of Near
Eastern Studies 27 (1968) 1–14. See also 30.1.