Following my critique of Niccacci’s methodological stances, I establish a new interpretation of Biblical Hebrew word order derived from Harald Weinrich’s Tempus. Its word order mirrors the opposition between comment and narrative registers. I describe the reasons for attributing a narrative function to the wayyiqtol and wqatal (verb-first) sentences while reserving the comment function to xqatal, xyiqtol, and xparticiple (verb-second) sentences. The occasional occurrence of a comment sentence in indirect speech is, in most cases, the syntactic mark of the narrator’s addresses to the reader.
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