The Anterior Construction in Classical Hebrew.

• Author: CREASON, STUART
• Position: Review

The Anterior Construction in Classical Hebrew. By ZIONY ZEVIT. Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series, vol. 50. Atlanta: SCHOLARS PRESS, 1998. Pp. Xiii + 94. $24.95.

This short monograph, which comprises a mere seventy-two pages (a bibliography and indices take up the remaining twenty-two), actually reads like two lengthy journal articles, one which covers a construction in Classical Hebrew which Zevit names the "anterior construction" (chapters two through four and seven) and another which contains Zevit's rather speculative remarks on tense and aspect in the Hebrew verbal system and on how tense may have been indicated historically in Hebrew (chapters five and six). Of the two parts, the first is more successful than the second, but neither presents a compelling case for the claims that the author makes.

In the first part of the book, Zevit analyzes the "anterior construction," which he defines as a clause with the structure [w.sup.e] + S(ubject) + qatal, which occurs in the context of "a past tense verb, (w)yqtl or qtl, in the narrative of the preceding clause" (p. 15). Such a clause, Zevit argues, indicates that the action indicated by that clause commenced prior to another action in the past. This idea is not a new one, as Zevit himself acknowledges, but he is the first to claim that this construction indicates anteriority in every context in which it is used. He attempts to support this claim by examining many of the examples of this construction that are attested in the Hebrew Bible. His analysis is sustained by some of his examples (e.g., Gen 20:3-4; 1 Sam 4:18), but in many other cases the analysis is forced, at best. For example, it seems far more likely that this construction signals contrast rather than anteriority in Gen 31:47; i.e., that the construction was used to highlight the fact that Laban named the place one thing but that Jacob named it another, not to indicate that Jacob named it before Laban did (cf. also Gen 1:5).

In the second part of the book, Zevit discusses tense and aspect in the Hebrew verbal system and argues that the system is a tense system and not an aspect system. He further proposes that tense was historically distinguished in Hebrew in part by a difference in the position of stress on a verbal form; i.e., that, in addition to the commonly recognized yaqtul preterite vs. yaqtulu present-future, Hebrew historically distinguished a qatal past vs. a qatal present-future, which is reflected in the...