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.