11. Philology and Grammar

The question of ‘tense’ or temporal meaning in Biblical Hebrew verbs has long challenged both scholars and lay readers, to the extent that it often appears that translations simply abandon any sense of system in favour of free adoption of whatever meaning would suit the needs of the immediate context. B.’s challenging monograph uses the most up-to-date linguistic theories to ‘increase the understanding of how the expression of temporal meanings in Biblical Hebrew relates to the semantics of the verbal forms’ (p. 4). The first three chapters deal with theoretical issues in general, leading to a detailed treatment of the Hebrew verb in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. B.’s concluding chapter offers a summary of his key observations: there are meanings, more basic to verb forms than tense, from which temporal meanings can be derived; the importance of aspect, defined as ‘the localization of the speaker’s and the listener’s ... focus ... on the event represented by the verb’; and the idea of stage-based aspect—‘progressive, resultant and preparatory’ (pp. 188-9). Tense then develops by way of inferences from the aspectual meanings of the form (p. 190). These proposals are tested in relation to the way that traditional qatal and yiqtol forms are deployed in the classical Hebrew texts. Not an easy read, but undoubtedly a significant contribution to our understanding of Hebrew verbal forms. alastair g. hUnter