Word Order and Narrative Strategies

271 occurrences of QATAL and WAYYIQTOL are motivated by factors relevant to narrative strategy. The precise motivations for each case may not be accessible to the modern reader or analyst, but the alternative is much more unsatisfactory, requiring the conclusion that the QATAL and WAYYIQTOL are sometimes used interchangeably for no apparent reason. These concepts need to be kept in min throughout the extensive sections of data displayed later on in this chapter.

9.2.2.2 Word Order and Narrative Strategies

The type of variations in word order differ from language to language, but one of the constants is that word order is context-sensitive. This is one of the reasons that claims for “basic word order” need to be carefully qualified with respect to genre, the syntactic environment, and narrative context. Whole books need to be written about word order phenomena in biblical Hebrew, but certain elementary observations need to be presented here before proceeding with the display of the data in this chapter. The specific word order issue to be introduced here is the WE - X - QATAL , which is briefly discussed above in 6.3.1.4. For example, Gen 4:1 begins with a WE - X - QATAL . Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, “I have gotten a manchild with the help of the LORD.” Pc-Pa-ncms vqp3ms Po-np ncfscX3ms Pc-vqw3fsXa Pc- vqw3fsXa Po-np Pc-vqw3fs vqp1cs ncms Pp-np ;5 5 5 8 5 Gen 4:1 When this is seen next to Gen 4:17, comparison of the WE - X - QATAL and WAYYIQTOL is facilitated. 272 Cain had relations with his wife and she conceived, and gave birth to Enoch Pc-vqw3ms np Po-ncfscX3ms Pc- vqw3fsXa Pc-vqw3fsXa Po-np ;5 4+ 5 5 Gen 4:1 There are several dimensions of this word order variation. The proposal here is that both the WAYYIQTOL and the WE - X - QATAL are motivated by narrative strategy. Specifically with reference to the WE - X - QATAL , analysis of its occurrences requires attention to all three components, the , the nominal item, and the QATAL in order to work toward an answer to questions like why Gen 4:1 has WE - X - QATAL and Gen 4:17 starts with a WAYYIQTOL . 9.2.2.3 Summary The goal in these preliminary comments is to alert the reader so that careful attention is given to: 1 these word order patterns, and 2 the contextual factors which motivate them In the display of the data below, some of the sections deal with occurrences of WE - X - QATAL or intervening clauses following the particular temporal expressions being discussed. Observations regarding the syntactic patterns and word order variations are made following these sections of data.

9.3 Temporal Expressions with

The presentation of the data in this chapter is very similar to that of the previous one, but the nature of the data itself requires the explicit discussion of certain grammatical or syntactic features. One of the main differences between the data in