Abstract

Although recent descriptions of ויהי have identified a number of plausible functions that this construction may fulfill, they seldom provide clearly defined criteria for interpreting specific occurrences. This paper illustrates that, if one systematically takes (1) the syntactic distribution of ויהי, (2) the semantic features of the clauses or phrases following ויהי, (3) recent advances in the description of the temporal relationships that are engaged in narratives, and (4) the position of ויה plus phrase or clause in a scene or episode, formulating such criteria is indeed possible.

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