Poetic Discourse and the Problem of Verbal Tenses in the Oracles of Balaam

The paper aims to contribute to the discussion about the problem of verbal tenses in biblical poetic discourse. The present research is based on three main insights: (1) The verbal forms in the poetic text are analyzed according to the universal semantic and pragmatic parameters; (2) The distinctive linear character of the poetic text (the parallelism) has no decisive influence on the semantic value of the verbal categories; (3) The functioning of verbal tenses in the biblical poetic text is not necessarily similar to their functioning in prosaic conversation. The criteria for the discourse analysis of a biblical poetic text endorse different levels of semantic and pragmatic information: the participants of the communication, the main pragmatic inferences of the speech, the aspectual and temporal arrangement of the text, and the principles of text progression. This approach enables us to perform an adequate semantic analysis of the verbal tenses to the biblical poetic discourse; the Oracles of Balaam are taken as a case study. The system of verbal tenses reconstructed with regard to the Oracles of Balaam reveals some deviations from Classical Biblical Hebrew: the system has some typologically archaic features, which are, nevertheless, arranged in a coherent and non-contradictory way.