THE EARLY HEBREW PREFIX-CONJUGATIONS

Abstract

Students of the Semitic languages in general as well as students and teach ers of biblical Hebrew in particular are in debt for providing a wide audience with a thorough review of the advances made over the last forty years in our understanding of the historical development of the Hebrew verb out of its earlier Canaanite matrix, and with a lucid presentation of the current status quaestionis. As a student of William L. Moran, another leading specialist in Amarna studies, I find myself, not surprisingly, in general agreement with presentation. In fact, what I would object to most is not something claimed by Rainey himself, in this and other papers of his (for which see the bibliography in Rainey 1986), but rather the title of this panel discussion, which was Rainey's Theory of the Development of the yiqtol In much of its essentials, what Rainey offers in these important articles is, unless I am badly mistaken, generally accepted by most of the small group of Amarna specialists, and by Semitists (see, e.g., Lambdin 1971). I do not, by any means, intend to detract from the very large role that Rainey has played over the last two decades in delineating, often with great insight, the Amarna evidence for this generally-accepted understanding. But to refer to the con struct as a whole as Rainey's theory is not really fair to the work of other scholars, whose contributions Rainey generously notes throughout his arti cles. As noted, I find little to disagree with in the essentials of presen tation. There are, however, inevitably details with which one may quibble, and subsidiary points of interest worth noting. In ? of his paper in Hebrew Studies (1986), Rainey reviews the scholarly discussion concerning the relative priority of the early Semitic forms yaqtul (the zero form) and yaqtulu. Rainey sides firmly with those who assign priority to the preterite-jussive yaqtul and I would agree. But a fairly recent voice for an alternative view should be noted, namely that of the late Jerzy Kurytowicz, who posited both perfective yaqtul and imperfective yaqtulu as primary forms in Proto-Semitic (Kurylowicz 1973). Kurytowicz's position has been challenged in a short but insightful note by Andras Hamori (1973). Hamori suggests that the early Semitic verbal system was like what we find in Akkadian, namely, perfective yaqtul and imperfective yaqattal, with both forms capable of being marked as subordinate or circumstantial by means of

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