God, Jonah, and the Benefit of Hebrew

Many of us know the beginning of the Jonah story well: God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach against it, but Jonah has other ideas. Instead of going to Nineveh in the heart of Assyria (modern day northern Iraq), Jonah gets on a ship bound for Tarshish (probably the Atlantic coast of Spain). But on his voyage to the other side of the known world, God catches up with Jonah, sending a storm that threatens to sink the ship. Jonah realises that God is chasing him and so offers himself as a placation to the stormy seas. He is thrown overboard by the frightened sailors, and just when we think Jonah is going to drown, he is swallowed up and preserved by a giant fish. Jonah’s life is saved and he is eventually spat up onto shore for ‘take two’.

Well, that’s at least how the story seems to run when you read an English Bible. According to our English translations, Jonah tries to outrun God, but God manages to chase him down. However, the Hebrew text of Jonah 1 actually suggests a slightly different storyline. And it all comes down to two particular types of verb that Hebrew uses in the narrative.

You see in Biblical Hebrew, the main job of the verbs is to get you to look at actions in particular ways, rather than simply tell you when the actions occur. It’s as though the Hebrew language drops you into the story itself to walk around and experience the action directly. And the Jonah narrative is no different.

The first verb relevant to our discussion is what we call the wayyiqtol (a.k.a. the ‘consecutive preterite’). This verb type is commonly found in narratives and helps drive a narrative forward. It lets you watch an action as though it were happening live. So every time you get a wayyiqtol verb in Hebrew, you are watching an action unfold right in front of you. Most of the verbs in Jonah 1 happen to be wayyiqtol verbs, and these help push the storyline along. And, as is custom in English, when you tell a story, you use the past tense:

• The word of Yahweh came to Jonah… (v.1)
• So Jonah got up to flee… (v.3)
• He went down to Joppa… (v.3)
• he found a ship… (v.3)
• he paid the fare… (v.3)
• he boarded it… (v.3)

As you can see, the narrative has a fairly brisk pace in v.3, as it relates Jonah’s hurried attempt to run from his divine commission.

However, in v.4, we encounter a different type of verb—what we call the qatal (a.k.a. the ‘perfect). Rather than depict an action happening live, it presents an action as a simple, established fact. When you come across a qatal verb in a narrative it usually serves to halt the narrative momentum by bringing something else to your attention. In this particular case it focuses on God’s action:

• But Yahweh had hurled a huge wind into the sea… (v.4)

You will notice that this action indicates a past tense. Since English convention usually tells stories in the past tense, it is often difficult to distinguish the significance of this particular qatal verb from the previous wayyiqtol verbs. Most English versions translate both types of verb with a simple past tense. However, the shift in verb usage here is quite significant. The story stops and we do not watch Yahweh hurl a huge wind into the sea. Rather, the narrator tells us that this action is already an established fact. In other words, it seems that Yahweh had already performed this action beforehand. The narrative then resumes the live action with a wayyiqtol verb:

• …and it became a huge storm at sea… (v.4)

What does all this mean? It seems that the narrator wants us to understand that Yahweh is in complete control of the situation. Although Jonah is on the run, trying to avoid his divine commission, Yahweh has already taken pre-emptive action, seemingly knowing that Jonah would be on his way to Tarshish rather than Nineveh. Yahweh is, therefore, not chasing after Jonah, as though Jonah might get away from him. And the storm at sea is not Yahweh’s Plan B. Rather, Yahweh had already placed the storm at sea, knowing full well that Jonah would be heading that way instead of heading to Nineveh. God had ‘snookered’ Jonah in advance.

In addition to the type of verbs the narrator uses, it is interesting to note the order in which the narrator describes the actions. We are left to discover the fact of God’s pre-emptive storm placement at the same time Jonah does. Thus, our picture of God develops gradually throughout the book, as we learn about his supreme sovereignty as well as, later in the story, his supreme compassion on a foreign enemy. We discover things about God in a way that allows us to critique Jonah’s presumption in ch.4.

Who said it isn’t worthwhile learning Biblical Hebrew? There’s gold in them there verbs!

Book Review: A Basic Introduction to Biblical Hebrew

I recently reviewed a new introductory Hebrew grammar by Prof. Jo Ann Hackett of the University of Texas at Austin. Prof. Hackett is perhaps best known for her work on the Balaam texts from Deir Alla. My review of her grammar book, A Basic Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (Hendrickson, 2010) is now up at Review of Biblical Literature, along with reviews by two others (Bernard Levinson and James Robson).

In short, I think this new grammar is a marked improvement on other older texts, especially in its attempt to be a true introductory grammar, rather than an undercover reference grammar. However, Prof. Hackett does make some choices that I do question.

Just after it became publicly available, Prof. Hackett contacted me about the review. With her permission, I’ve made some of her comments available here. As far as I know, no journal actually publishes an author’s response to reviews, so I’m glad to provide her with a public right of reply here. It’s best to read the review first, and then her comments below.

Jo Ann Hackett: I have just read your review of my textbook, and I must say that most of your negative reactions have been mirrored by others.  And I remain unconvinced, of course!  I do want to question, however, your suggestion that I treat what you call the “vav consecutive” as if it simply reverses the tense of the verb, because that is something I most certainly do not do, and I’m not quite sure how you could assume that I do.  I would suggest you read 15.3, where I specifically reject that point of view, and 15.4, which I hope shows that I think the historical explanation is correct.

In 16.8, where I say that some people believe that the vav of the ve-qatal form exists as an imitation of the wayyiqtol vav, I suppose you might read it the way you did, but even there, the explanation depends to a certain extent on the historical explanation of the wayyiqtol form.  So I don’t understand that part of the review, and to be honest, I really hate it that such a thing is out there about me, being read by people who don’t know any better.

Let me add a less serious aside.  The objections I’ve gotten to the fact that we call the verb by the 3ms SC form, even though I don’t start there, have all come from teachers.  I’ve taught this to all sorts of students, and I’ve yet to have a single one confused by it.  The same goes for the 1st-person first decision.  Teachers often hate it because we all learned it the other way.  Students, who don’t know any better, never even notice.  I have to admit that it’s hard for me, too, because I have them recite the paradigms and have to remember that they’re doing it in the way I taught them, not the way I learned it.

As you will see in her first paragraph, Prof. Hackett takes me to task for misrepresenting her on the ‘vav consecutive’. Having had my own arguments misrepresented in reviews, I can understand the frustration this can cause an author. However, in this case, I think there is some ambiguity inherent in the wording used within the grammar book that explains why I received the apparently wrong impression. In the review I state that it is unfortunate that Hackett opts for viewing the waw (or ‘vav‘) prefix of the wayyiqtol as a ‘waw conversive’—that is, an element that somehow converts or reverses tense. I quote §15.3 (p.90) of the book in its entirety:

15.3 Other Names For the Consecutive Preterite

The form we are calling the consecutive preterite is usually called “converted imperfect,” as if the addition of the וַ somehow “converted” a future-tense verb into a past-tense verb. It is also called the “imperfect with vav consecutive,” a better choice, but also misleading, since the basic verb is not the “imperfect” (our prefix conjugation) but rather the jussive.

You will see from this paragraph that there is no specific denial of the concept of a converted imperfect. The first sentence is stated without challenge. It is most likely that Prof. Hackett intended the ‘also’ in the phrase ‘but also misleading’ (second sentence) to signify a denial of the veracity of both the ‘converted imperfect’ and ‘imperfect with vav consecutive’ terminologies. However, since the concept of a ‘converted imperfect’ is not labelled misleading immediately after it is described, the impression I gained was that ‘also misleading’ applied only to the use of the word ‘imperfect’ in the terminology. In other words, I read the paragraph as saying that the wayyiqtol (or ‘consecutive preterite’ as Hackett terms it) can also be conceptualised as a ‘converted imperfect’ or, even better as an ‘imperfect with vav consecutive’, even though the wayyiqtol happens to be using the jussive, rather than the imperfect (yiqtol). Thus, although Prof. Hackett meant to put these other terms forward so as to deny their veracity or usefulness, there is no specific and unambiguous statement to that effect, and the paragraph can plausibly be read as though it were a mild endorsement (albeit with slight correction) of these conceptualities.

I am quite relieved to learn from Prof. Hackett that she does not endorse the ‘waw conversive’ or ‘consecutive imperfect’ views of the wayyiqtol. Yet, that makes the ambiguity inherent in the wording of §15.3 all the more unfortunate. I’m quite glad, however, that this issue could be raised and clarified here, and hope that instructors using the book are aware of the ambiguity and can take action to ensure a proper understanding of this particular section the way Prof. Hackett intended it.