The Enigma of the Hebrew Verbal System.

• Author: Daniels, Peter T.

This book, originally a University of Cambridge doctoral dissertation,(1) is divided into two unequal parts. Part 1 is a survey of the theories accounting for the forms and functions of the so-called Waw-consecutive forms in Classical Hebrew, from earliest times until 1954, but concentrating on nineteenth- and twentieth-century grammarians. Part 2 (labeled "Appendix 2," pp. 189-210) is an interesting statistical study of several tone-shift phenomena in Biblical Hebrew. Here I offer some thoughts occasioned by each of the parts.(2)

In part 1, McFall presents no analysis or conclusions of his own, but his summaries of the various scholars' arguments are reliable and at least no harder to follow than the originals. He thus makes it possible to follow a train of philological thought that reflection ought to have shown to be untenable, but that he reports as if it were just another of the ways of looking at Waw-consecutives.

I refer to the notion that one can explain the evolution of the consecutive forms, or of any other component of the Hebrew verbal system, in terms of an "oldest" Semitic verb form (or worse, an "oldest" Hebrew verb form). The earlier authors considered by McFall, up through the grammars of Ewald, who might be considered the last pre-modern, and S. R. Driver, whom we might take as the first modern--that is, the earliest author on Hebrew grammar who is still cited--gave strictly synchronic, descriptive accounts of the Hebrew verbal system. The first to attempt a diachronic, historical explanation of the Semitic verb, and also (not by coincidence) the first to take into account the recently discovered Akkadian, was Paul Haupt, the Assyriologist. In 1878 he published a short article, "The Oldest Semitic Verb Form."(3) On the basis of the Akkadian iparras (basic stem present) and the Ethiopic yenagger (also basic stem present), not found elsewhere in Semitic, he decided that this form iqattal must be the "oldest verbal form of the Semitic family of speech." He was followed by another Assyriologist, J. A. Knudtson, who derived the iqtul preterite from iqattal, as a "close second."

It was Hans Bauer who applied this sort of thinking to Hebrew;(4) he used stress permutations (such as were much later taken up again by Robert Hetzron(5)) to account for the eventual distinction between yiqtol and wayyiqtol (whatever the precise semantic difference may be). In its incarnation in one of the few standard references now used in Biblical Hebrew studies, Bauer's and Leander's historical grammar,(6) it is still studied today.

But it should not be. I now turn to the reasons for a priori ruling out of discussion on any theory that posits an "oldest" Semitic verb form. First, articulate humanity is not a historically recent phenomenon specially created a few millennia before the Hebrew scriptures were composed or recorded. Even before Darwin's and Wallace's initial publications on evolution in 1859, or The Descent of Man in 1871, the age of the earth was reckoned in the millions of years, and Bible scholars reconciled this with an allegorical or metaphorical understanding of the Genesis creation texts. In the 1850s the first evidences of human evolution were being uncovered in the Neander Valley and elsewhere in Europe, and it was soon to become impossible to insist on a...