21st Century Bible Hebrew -- The complete paradigm from the top

Now it’s time to start all over again and organize things by subject.

First, BH is not a tense language. It is an aspect language, like modern Arabic, Russian, and Chinese as well as ancient Semitic languages.

The aspectual world hinges on expressing repetition, process, or completion, in aspects called imperfec(ive), progressive, or perfect(ive). Russian and Arabic do not have the progressive aspect in morphology; they express the same concept in other ways.

Aspectual languages generally leave out the copula in equational sentences because equation is not one of the above.

Aspectual languages generally have a separate form that is called in when the nuances of the aspects don’t apply to a given context.

In Biblical Hebrew (BH), the uses of imperfect aspect are as follows.

1.                  vav plus imperfect in VS order is “narrative past”, used within an episode to track the progress of the plot.

2.                  vav plus subject plus imperfect is a relative or coordinate clause.

3.                  without vav in SV order is possibly a true future tense usage.

4.                  without vav may also be an imperfect of process; this first turns up in Leviticus and may be a clue to the relationship between imperfect and progressive aspects.

5.                  vav plus imperfect in the 2nd singular or plural define the generalized or definitional envelope of commandments or refer to a known cultural feature.

6.                  in the 3rd person, in portions about sacrificial ritual, imperfect provides the framework for the ritual actions like the generalization envelope for a k’lal u-prat [u-k’lal] structure.

7.                  Preceded by ki or im is the “if” clause in a law, usually a tort. Again, this is an envelope to a klal uprat [uklal] structure.

8.                  part of a parallel structure in poetry and prophecy following a perfect verb as a parallel. They will not use the same verb root and sometimes not the same binyan.

Next week I’ll start giving examples of these usages.

Notice how the focus of the imperfect on action, rather than completion, leads us directly to one of Olrik’s principles. The normal world of an oral narrative is the culture-related actions which the protagonist performs on his way to the denouement. Yes, he has to complete each one of them to progress through the narrative, but it’s the progress that matters, not the completion. This suggests a relationship between narrative past and progressive aspect, although narrative past is the normal verb form in narratives.