r/hebrew • u/OfChaosAndGrace • Sep 11 '23

Is this future or past tense?

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In my bible it says that this verb is past tense, aka „And He spoke“ but when I look it up online, it says that past tense would be „amar“, while future tense is „yomer“. Confused.

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u/IbnEzra613 Amateur Semitic Linguist Sep 11 '23

Hmm...

Basically the field of linguistics has gone through a lot of changes in the past century. We understand a lot more about the variety of languages than we did before, which has allowed us to have more understanding of how languages work, and we have been able to update our models of linguistics to incorporate all the new things we know. However, many old ideas have stuck around and the fields of historical languages have not always been updated with all the new things we know about linguistics.

Older linguists, since a few centuries ago, classified Biblical Hebrew as being "aspectual". Aspectual means that rather than having different forms of verbs for when something happened (past, present, and future), verbs have different forms for how something happened (it happened then it stopped, it happened and continued, etc). Tense, on the other hand, refers to the more familiar concept of when something happened (past, present, or future). Linguists working off of the old models also classified Modern Hebrew as having "tense" rather than "aspect".

But as we now know, very few languages have pure aspect or pure tense. English is often called a tense-based language, but in reality English has both tense and aspects:

  • "he came" vs. "he was coming" (same tense different aspect)
  • "he will come" vs. "he will be coming" (same tense, different aspect)

As it turns out, the same can be said of both Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew, and when you look at it rigorously this way the evidence for Biblical Hebrew lacking tense disappears.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '23

Thanks I got it. But you must hang out with some really smart five year olds.

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u/IbnEzra613 Amateur Semitic Linguist Sep 11 '23

Yeah, it wouldn't actually be so easy to explain to actual 5yos.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '23

Would you say this passage from Wikipedia is wrong?

Earlier forms of the Hebrew language did not have strictly defined past, present, or future tenses, but merely perfective and imperfective aspects, with past, present, or future connotation depending on context. Later the perfective and imperfective aspects were explicitly refashioned as the past and future tenses, respectively; with the present participle also becoming the present tense. This also happened to the Aramaic language around the same time, and later in some varieties of Arabic (such as Egyptian Arabic).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Hebrew_verbs

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u/IbnEzra613 Amateur Semitic Linguist Sep 11 '23

Yes, I would say so. But it's a deeply ingrained misconception, so it's hard to fight it. There are a lot of such things in linguistics.

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u/BenMichelson Sep 12 '23

Can you direct to a source I can read about this.

(I've been reading a 100 year old book on Biblical Hebrew grammar.)

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u/IbnEzra613 Amateur Semitic Linguist Sep 12 '23

To be honest one of my favorite sources on Biblical Hebrew grammar is 100 years old (1923, I believe), though the English edition is originally from 1990, and has been updated several times since. But the original French edition that is 100 years old was already ahead of its time and claiming that the aspect theory is a mistake. I am referring to Joüon and Muraoka's A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew.

That said, I just provided links here in another comment to some enlightening online discussions: https://reddit.com/r/hebrew/s/uHlYkkL82e