Tense, Aspect, and Mood in Biblical Hebrew Verbs

One of the problems encountered by the beginning student of Biblical Hebrew is the lack of clarity regarding tense, aspect, and modality in the verb system of Biblical Hebrew. Tense denotes the location in time of the event or state expressed by the verb. Aspect has to do with the way in which the event or state expressed by the verb is viewed as progressing within time, while mood or modality denotes the attitude of the speaker to the reality, necessity, possibility, or probability of the event or state expressed by the verb.

The best way of understanding the verb in Biblical Hebrew is to see it in the light of how it developed historically. It is generally held that Proto-Hebrew (on analogy with Ugaritic) had three major conjugations: the perfect yaqtul, the imperfect yaqtulu, and the suffix verb form qatala. The perfect was used for events viewed as a simple whole (i.e., perfective or aoristic aspect). The binary opposite of the perfect was the imperfect. The imperfect was used for events that were viewed as being non-perfective (i.e., as somehow unfolding in time, whether continuous, habitual, iterative, or future). The suffix verb form qatala seems to have been primarily used with stative verbs (without regard to time), but it was also used with dynamic verbs in the apodosis of conditional constructions. There was also a jussive conjugation that was identical to the perfect (yaqtul) in form.

Over time, it seems that the imperfect lost its final vowel. This resulted in the imperfect coming to have the same form as the perfect yaqtul and the jussive (i.e., they all had the form yaqtul). This in turn resulted in a restriction in the use of the perfect yaqtul to clause-initial position with a vav prefix in prose (i.e., wayyiqtol in Biblical Hebrew). The use of the suffix verb form qatala was expanded with it being conscripted to be used in place of the perfect yaqtul in non-clause-initial situations in prose. In this way, the suffix verb form qatala came to be fully perfective (i.e., used for states and events viewed as a simple whole regardless of time). The similarity in form between the imperfect and the jussive also led to the imperfect taking on board the non-indicative modal senses of ability, necessity, and possibility of the jussive, leading to the situation in Biblical Hebrew where the imperfect is used to express non-indicative modality as well as non-perfective aspect. On analogy with the clause-initial use of the wayyiqtol, it seems that the weqatal form developed from the sequential sense of qatala in the apodoses of conditional constructions. The weqatal construction ended up becoming, therefore, the imperfective verb in clause-initial position.

The verb system of Biblical Hebrew, therefore, is best thought of as primarily marking aspect. Tense has to be determined primarily from the context, although it should also be said that, because the imperfective aspect marks verbs as unfolding in time, perfective verbs naturally gravitate to the past while imperfective verbs gravitate to the future.

The end result in Biblical Hebrew can be summarized as follows:

perfective yiqtol: either as wayyiqtol in prose, or yiqtol in poetry;

qatal: perfective, usually non-clause-initial;

imperfective yiqtol: imperfective aspect or non-indicative modality, non-clause-initial;

imperfective weqatal: imperfective aspect or non-indicative modality, clause-initial;

participle (qotel) = continuous or gnomic aspect, or else used in place of a relative clause whose aspect must be picked up from the context.