Slimboyfat, my impression of Rolf Furuli is
that he attempted to defend the indefensible, by propping up the Titanic, so to
speak, and for that reason he would sink with it. He was not very honest
either, never admitting in his books that he was a Witness or that he self-published. He would stick with Franz’s explanation of the Hebrew Verbal System (HVS) to his detriment.
Allow me to quote criticism of his
work by John Cook in his treatise, “Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The
Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew.” Cook discusses most modern theories of the HVS. It is interesting to note what he had to say about Furuli's thesis. Furuli believed
that there is no difference between the waw-prefixed
forms and their formal non-waw-prefixed
counterparts, and I quote:
“The most recent permutation of this type of
theory comes from Furuli (2006), who
claims based on his examination of all the verb forms in the Hebrew Bible, Ben
Sira, and the Dead Sea Scrolls that there were only two conjugations: a
perfective suffix conjugation (qatal
and wĕqatal) and an imperfective
prefix conjugation (yiqtol and wayyiqtol; Furuli 2006:4) He concludes
that a diachronic approach is problematic and unnecessary, since (1) there is
no evidence of a prefix preterite in Northwest Semitic or Akkadian, and (2)
there is no evidence in his corpus of any semantic change in the Hebrew verbal
forms (Furuli 2006: 147).
Furul’s
approach is based on two premises that he claims are not taken into account by
any earlier theories. This first is a systematic distinction between past time
reference and past tense. Although it is a sound principle, Furuli uses this premise
to dismiss out of hand any and every tense explanation of Hebrew and Semitic
(e.g., Furuli 2006: 32, 98). Furuli claims that context “can fix the temporal
reference of a verb” and then refuses to acknowledge any other possible means
of fixing temporal reference – that is, tense (Furuli 2006:100).
His
second principle is that aspect (viewpoint aspect, in particular) in Hebrew is
of a different sort than English aspect, which he claims informs most previous
understandings. Unfortunately it is unclear to me the basis for his claim
because the only explanation he offers is, “because aspect is a kind of
viewpoint, it is not obvious that it has the same nature in the different
aspectual languages of the world” (Furuli 2006: 49).
A
full survey of Furuli’s work would take too long and yield too little of value
(see the reviews of Kummerow 2007 and Cook 2010). Here I mention the two
fundamental difficulties with his theory that are most germane to this
discussion: his treatment of wayyiqtol and
his analysis of aspect. A major if not central focus of Furuli’s work is to
show that wayyiqtol is not a distinct prefix form from yiqtol (and wĕyiqtol) but is an invention of the Masoretes. He recognizes that a major obstacle to his argument is that 93.1%
(according to his analysis) of wayyiqtols
in the Bible refer to past events, which accounts for the majority view that
the form has developed from a Semitic prefixed preterite form. He argues,
however, that, “because of the problem of induction, confirmatory examples can
never confirm a hypothesis, but contradictory ones can even falsify it” (Furuli
2006:73). Thus Furuli admits that he allows 6.9% of the evidence to drive his
semantic theory of wayyiqtol! The
obvious protest to this is that Hebrew is an ancient language, attested only in
composite and redacted texts that has been vocalized (which is the
distinguishing factor between wayyiqtol
and wĕyiqtol) only hundreds of years
after the stabilization of the text. But this point aside, Sapir’s dictum that “grammar
leak” certainly applies here. Further, Furuli’s argument that the Masoretes
created the wayyiqtol form and that
they made mistakes in writing the form appears prima facie to cancel out the
significance of his 6.9% of counterexamples: these data are simply “errors" introduced by the Masoretes; but even so, if the form is simply a Masoretic
invention, how can any of the examples be deemed either erroneous or
representative of the actual language of the texts? In addition, Furuli (2006:459)
admits that his theory is completely at odds with the typological data on TAM
but dismisses those findings, stating that: “we should not force modern views
upon a dead language.” This comment betrays a lack of understanding of not only
typology but the nature of languages and language universal!”
Furuli, Rolf J.
2006 A
New Understanding of the Verbal System of Classical Hebrew: An Attempt to Distinguish
between Semantic and Pragmatic Factors. Oslo: Awatu.
There’s more but that’s enough for the time
being. The above allows one a general impression of his work. Cook could not
understand his reasoning, but we can. By sticking to Frederick Franz’s theory
on the Hebrew Verbal System, he would build an elaborate hypothesis, only to be
shot down by his peers.
