A Reconsideration of the Prophetic Perfect in Biblical Hebrew

The future time uses of the Suffix Conjugation (SC) in Biblical Hebrew (BH) have troubled interpreters for over a thousand years. A SC with future time reference was often labeled a praeteritum propheticum until the 19th century when Ewald developed a new approach to the BH verbal system (BHVS). Ewald argued that the SC expressed a complete (hence Perfect) situation, rather than a past time situation as most of his contemporaries believed. Later in the same century Driver popularized Ewald’s theory and from that time on, these future time SCs were known as Prophetic Perfects. Although this theory was dominant in the late 19th and 20th century literature, many alternative approaches have arisen. Rogland made an astute contribution arguing that the so-called Prophetic Perfect is not one category of use, but several. He used relative tense and other contextual clues to explain some of the alleged Prophetic Perfects. This dissertation explains the future time uses of the SC that have been inappropriately conflated with those identified by Rogland as expressing relative past time under the Prophetic Perfect. After a selective review of the literature over the last thousand years, the stative uses of the SC are explained and described. A stative expresses a situation with nonprogressive, continuous imperfective aspect and is unmarked for tense, viewpoint aspect, or mood. It is argued that the SC is used to express future stative situations. Similarly, it is argued that future stative situations are also expressed by the SC in the Niphal stem. The SC is also used to express future time situations with epistemic modality. This irrealis use is indicated by word order (WO), typically clause-initial WO. It is argued that some are clause-initial while others are noninitial because the normal WO for irrealis verbs was disrupted by constituent preposing.Biblical studiesLanguageBiblical Hebrew, irrealis, prophetic literature, Prophetic Perfect, semitics, stativeSemitic and Egyptian Languages and LiteraturesDegree Awarded: Ph.D. Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures. The Catholic University of Americ