The Verb Conjugations in Biblical Hebrew

A model based on the interaction of conjugation type and word order with the cognitive category of "definiteness"...

Having taught myself Biblical Hebrew, I rapidly became aware that the system of verb conjugations was poorly understood. There are many theories as to the differences in meaning between the two conjugations, but many English versions of the Old Testament seem to regularly ignore the contrast between the conjugations in their translations of the psalms and other poetic material.

As a (plant) scientist I was used to dealing with 'fuzzy' data. I have also done field linguistics, analysing an unwritten language by amassing a large corpus of spoken text. I used these experiences to approach Biblical Hebrew, reading the Old Testament text corpus repeatedly until consistent meanings for the conjugations began to crystallise out. The results of this data-driven approach are briefly summarised below, and you can also read the full paper. I hope that the model I propose below may be of benefit, or at least food for thought, for anyone attempting to translate the Hebrew Old Testament.

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There are two primary verb conjugations in Biblical Hebrew (BH), the suffix conjugation with the basic form qatal, often termed the 'perfective', and the prefix conjugation yiqtol, often termed the 'imperfective'. There is also a form similar to the prefix conjugation with a prefixed wa-, denoted by wayyiqtol. This is largely, but not exclusively, used for narrative, and at an earlier stage of the language was a simple past tense in opposition to yiqtol, but was subsequently supplanted by qatal. The imperative, cohortative and jussive forms are closely related to yiqtol, and for many verbs the jussive forms are indistinguishable from it.

The two basic verb forms are the primary means available to speakers of BH to express a wide range of verbal meanings. While English also has only two basic forms, these are supplemented by the formation of compound tenses and an extensive repertoire of auxiliary verbs. So how does BH manage? Scholars have long recognised that some clause initial forms are different, but they have attributed this to the presence of a w- prefix, and a number of scholars have identified wqatal forms as modal. wyiqtol forms are also considered to be a special category although there is less agreement as to their significance.

However I argue that wqatal forms are modal not because of the prefix but their position in the clause. It is clear that the first position in a BH clause can be a marked position, for example with object fronting. My model proposes that BH is fundamentally an SVO language, and any fronted verbs are marked. Marking the verb strongly asserts it, and effectively turns it into a strong modal. The lack of punctuation in BH can make it difficult to determine clause-initial position. In addition, there are a number of emphatic particles such as kî  and ʾim, as well as the non-emphatic particles like w-, which can precede this clause-initial position. Bearing these caveats in mind, it is possible to create the following table to describe verb semantics:

	qatal	yiqtol
clause initial	unchallengeable asserted modality   epistemic: ʻX will certainly...ʼ   deontic: ʻX must....ʼ	challengeable asserted modality   volitive: ʻlet X ...ʼ   epistemic: ʻX will ... [wonʼt they?]ʼ
clause non-initial	preterite (simple past)	non-preterite (present, future, habitual)

Clause-initial qatal thus covers both deontic ('you must') and epistemic ('this is unchallengeably true') modality. Samuel's instructions to Saul in 1 Sam 10:2-6 consists of a whole series of clause-initial qatal verbs detailing Samuel's prophetic assertion of what will happen (epistemic) and how Saul must respond (deontic).

Clause-initial yiqtol overlaps both orthographically and semantically with jussive, and its meaning is less obvious, but it would appear to involve assertion of a (usually future) event that is challengeable by the listener, as is the case with the derived imperative, cohortative and jussive forms. One may contrast English 'Go and tidy your room immediately!' which is challengeable, and must therefore be issued in a loud voice to be effective, with 'You are to tidy your room immediately' which is unchallengeable, and all the more menacing if said in a quiet voice.

The meaning of wayyiqtol is more speculative. As wayyiqtol became restricted to narrative usage only, speakers would no longer understand its semantics as contrasting those of yiqtol, and the form would increasingly have been seen as a marker for narrative genre rather than for any particular tense or aspect. It may then have been reinterpreted with similar, or even identical, semantics to clause-initial yiqtol, the different syllable count of wayyiqtol forms providing helpful prosodic flexibility, thereby explaining the almost complete restriction of its non-narrative use to the Psalms and other poetry.

In an accompanying post I offer a translation of Psalm 44 as a case study of applying this model of the BH verb system.