The Narrative Chain (Wayyiqtol)

Open any story in the Old Testament in an interlinear and look at the start of each clause. Again and again you will see the same shape: a וַ (wa-, and), then a doubled consonant, then a verb that looks like an imperfect. וַיֹּאמֶר (wayyomer, and he said). וַיֵּלֶךְ (wayyelekh, and he went). וַיְהִי (wayhi, and it came to pass). This is the narrative form, and in the Open Scriptures tagging of the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) it accounts for about 21 percent of all Hebrew verb forms, roughly fifteen thousand of them. It is as common as the perfect, and in the historical books it is the most common verb form of all.

Grammars and tools call it by several names, and the names carry a history you will meet in section 4. The older grammars called it the imperfect with waw consecutive, or waw conversive, and some tools still label it consecutive imperfect or sequential imperfect. Many modern grammars call it simply wayyiqtol, after its shape with the old model root, as lesson 4 explained for qatal and yiqtol. The Open Scriptures data underlying several tools labels it sequential imperfect. All of these name the same form.

You can usually recognise it on sight. The vav at the front has a patach, the short a vowel, under it, and the next letter, the person prefix, has a dot doubling it: וַיִּ (wayyi-), וַתִּ (watti-), וַנִּ (wanni-). In the first person singular the prefix is aleph, which cannot be doubled, so the vowel under the vav lengthens instead: וָאֶשְׁבֹּר (wa'eshbor, and I broke) in Leviticus 26:13. And very often the verb itself is shorter than the ordinary imperfect. The WLC has וַיְהִי (wayhi) where the ordinary imperfect is יִהְיֶה (yihyeh), and וַיָּקָם (wayyaqom, and he rose) where the ordinary imperfect is יָקוּם (yaqum, he will rise). That shortening is one of the clues to the form's history.

In stories it is almost always rendered with an English past, and each one usually moves the story a step forward: and he rose, and he went, and he saw, and he said. That is why the Greek translators of the Septuagint and the KJV both begin so many verses with And: they were following the Hebrew. Modern versions like the BSB often drop the and, combine clauses, or use so, then and when instead, which reads better in English but hides the chain. To see the chain you need the Hebrew, or at least an interlinear.

Now the anchor. In the WLC, Genesis 22:3 runs as a single chain of six wayyiqtol verbs, with objects and phrases between them. Here they are in order, with root and stem. וַיַּשְׁכֵּם (wayyashkem, and he rose early), hiphil of שׁכם (sh-k-m), a verb found in the WLC only in the hiphil. וַיַּחֲבֹשׁ (wayyachavosh, and he saddled), qal of חבשׁ (ch-v-sh, to bind or saddle). וַיִּקַּח (wayyiqqach, and he took), qal of לקח (l-q-ch, to take), where the first root letter has merged into the doubled q. וַיְבַקַּע (wayvaqqa', and he split), piel of בקע (b-q-', to split), with the doubled middle letter that lesson 3 taught you to see. וַיָּקָם (wayyaqom, and he rose), qal of קום (q-w-m), in the short form. And וַיֵּלֶךְ (wayyelekh, and he went), qal of הלך (h-l-k, to go), which Strong's lists under a separate number, H3212, for forms that look as if they came from a root with yod; do not let the numbering confuse you.

Read them in a row and the effect is plain. The narrator tells us exactly what Abraham did and nothing about what he felt. Rose early, saddled, took, split, rose, went. There is not one adjective of emotion, not one word of motive. Commentators have noticed the odd order too: Abraham saddles the donkey and gathers the party before he splits the wood, as though he is doing the jobs as they come to hand, or putting off the one that means most. The text does not say, and that silence is part of how the story works. Module 5 of this track and the Hermeneutics lesson Narrative take up this kind of reticence; here the point is grammatical. The wayyiqtol chain is how Hebrew narrators give you the bare sequence of action and let you feel its weight yourself.

Then the chain stops. The verse ends אֶל הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר אָמַר לוֹ הָאֱלֹהִים (el ha-maqom asher amar lo ha'elohim, to the place which God had said to him). אָמַר (amar) is a perfect, not a wayyiqtol, inside a relative clause introduced by asher. It does not move the story forward; it looks back to God's command in 22:2. The BSB renders it 'the place God had designated', with an English pluperfect, and the same clause recurs in 22:9. This is the first of the ways a Hebrew narrator steps out of the chain: a perfect in a subordinate clause, giving information that is not the next event.

The other common way is to put something other than the verb first. In Hebrew narrative the wayyiqtol must stand at the head of its clause, so if the writer wants to begin a clause with its subject, or with a time phrase, or with a negative, he cannot use the wayyiqtol; he uses a perfect, or a participle, or a clause with no verb at all. Genesis 22 begins exactly this way: וַיְהִי אַחַר הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה וְהָאֱלֹהִים נִסָּה אֶת אַבְרָהָם (wayhi achar ha-devarim ha'elleh we-ha'elohim nissah et avraham, and it came to pass after these things, and God tested Abraham). God comes first, then נִסָּה (nissah, he tested), a piel perfect. The narrator has given you the heading before the story starts: this is a test, which Abraham does not know and the reader does. Genesis 1:2 opens the same way, with the earth first and a perfect after it, and Exodus 3:1 with Moses first and a participle: scene-setting before the action begins.

These observations have been gathered into a simple and useful way of reading. The wayyiqtol chain is the mainline of a story, the series of events that carry it forward. Clauses that step out of the chain, by putting something before the verb or by using another form, are off the line. They set the scene, give background, describe what was happening at the same time, look back to something earlier, or slow the story down at a moment that matters. Robert Longacre showed how much this explains in Joseph: A Story of Divine Providence (1989), a discourse study of Genesis 37 to 48, and Alviero Niccacci, whom you met in lesson 4, built a whole syntax of Hebrew prose on it.

You can use this immediately, with no theory at all. Take a story, mark every wayyiqtol, and read only those verbs. You will have the plot. Then read the clauses you did not mark. They will tell you where and when, who was doing what in the background, what had happened before, and very often what the narrator most wants you to know. In Genesis 22, the off-line material is the heading in 22:1, the look back to God's word in 22:3 and 22:9, and the speeches. Notice too what the narrator does with the mainline itself: the plain wayyiqtol clause that the two of them walked on together comes twice, in 22:6 and 22:8, on either side of the only exchange between father and son, so that a repeated step of the plot becomes a refrain.

Speech works differently, and you should notice it so that it does not confuse you. In dialogue, characters use perfects for what has happened, imperfects for what will, and commands and participles freely, as people do when they talk. Wayyiqtol forms occur in speech too, usually when a speaker tells a story within the story, but they need not be past. In Exodus 3:8 God says וָאֵרֵד (wa'ered), a wayyiqtol of the first person, rendered 'I have come down'. In Isaiah 9:6, as lesson 4 showed, two wayyiqtols follow the perfects of the child's birth and are rendered as futures. The form takes its time from the frame it continues.

That last observation is one reason the form is debated. If wayyiqtol were simply a past tense, why would it be rendered as a future in a prophecy? If it simply means and then, why does it sometimes seem not to follow what precedes it? Those are the two questions of the next section.

The first debate is about what the form is. The medieval Jewish grammarians called its vav the vav of reversal, and the name passed into Christian grammars as waw conversive: an imperfect, which normally points to the future, is converted into a past by the vav, just as the vav on a perfect, weqatal, converts a past into a future or a command. That account has the great merit of simplicity, and it describes the uses accurately enough that beginners' grammars still teach it. Most Hebraists today, however, hold that the wayyiqtol is not a converted imperfect but a different form that happens to look like one. Comparative study of the Semitic languages has shown an old short prefix form used for the past, most clearly in the Akkadian preterite, and they argue that wayyiqtol preserves it. The evidence is in the shapes you saw in section 1: the short forms like wayhi and wayyaqom, which match the short jussive rather than the long imperfect; the shift of stress in some verbs; and old Hebrew poetry, where plain prefix forms without the vav sometimes narrate the past, as in Exodus 15:12, 'the earth swallowed them up', where the verb is a prefix form, תִּבְלָעֵמוֹ (tivla'emo). On this view the vav and the doubling are what remains of the way that old past form was joined to a story. Those who are more cautious point out that the evidence is indirect: many wayyiqtols are not short at all, the first person sometimes takes a lengthened ending, and no one has fully explained the doubling after the vav. The difference matters little for translation; both accounts render the form the same way in narrative. It matters for explaining why the form behaves as it does.

The second debate is the one that matters for preaching: does wayyiqtol always present events in sequence? The traditional name, consecutive, and the mainline account in section 3 both suggest that it does: each wayyiqtol is the next thing that happened. Some grammarians hold that this is the form's meaning and that any apparent exception is better explained by the structure of the passage than by the verb. Others hold that sequence is the normal use but not an absolute rule, and that in some contexts a wayyiqtol can summarise, explain, or even refer back to something that happened earlier. C. John Collins argued this case in an article in the Tyndale Bulletin (1995), titled The Wayyiqtol as Pluperfect: When and Why, setting out the conditions under which he believed a wayyiqtol could carry a pluperfect sense. Many tense and aspect theorists, such as those met in lesson 4, treat the form as basically a past or perfective form whose sequence comes from the narrative, not from the verb.

Genesis 2:19 is where the second debate reaches the pulpit. The WLC begins the verse וַיִּצֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים מִן הָאֲדָמָה כָּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה (wayyitser YHWH elohim min ha'adamah kol chayyat ha-sadeh, and the LORD God formed from the ground every beast of the field). Read as sequence, the LORD forms the animals after the man and after his statement that the man needs a helper, and brings them to him. The KJV and the BSB both say formed. Read as a possible pluperfect, the verse looks back to animals God had already formed and now brings them to the man, which is how the NIV renders it: had formed. Each side has real arguments. For the sequential reading: it is the normal sense of the form; the pluperfect in this very chapter is expressed differently, by a perfect in an asher clause, 'the man He had formed' in 2:8; and chapter 2 has its own way of telling creation, centred on the man, which need not follow chapter 1's order. For the pluperfect reading: Hebrew narrators often step back to fill in what a reader needs, the context here is the bringing of the animals rather than their making, and reading 2:19 as a flashback lets the two chapters' orders agree. Behind the grammar lie wider convictions about how Genesis 1 and 2 relate, and you will meet those in Old Testament Survey. What the grammar can tell you is that formed is the form's ordinary sense, and that had formed is a defensible but debated extension of it.

Whichever side you take, take it knowingly. Do not tell a congregation that the Hebrew proves the animals were made after Adam, because careful grammarians dispute that the form must mean sequence there. And do not tell them that the Hebrew clearly says had formed, because the form most naturally means formed, and the pluperfect is an argument from context. The honest thing to say is what the form usually does, why some readers think this case is different, and why it matters to them.

Here is the method, which works on any narrative passage. First, tap through the passage and mark every wayyiqtol. Write the verbs out in a column on their own, in English, one per line: rose early, saddled, took, split, rose, went. That column is the mainline. Read it aloud. It is usually the plot, stripped bare.

Second, go back and mark every clause that is not a wayyiqtol. For each, ask what is before the verb, if anything, and what form the verb is. Then ask what the clause is doing: setting the scene, giving background, looking back, describing something at the same time, or reporting speech. Write one word beside each: scene, background, back, meanwhile, speech.

Third, look at the places where the chain is broken in the middle of the action. These are often the moments the narrator most wants you to notice. In Genesis 22, after the mainline has carried Abraham all the way to the knife in 22:10, the next wayyiqtol is not Abraham's at all: the angel of the LORD calls from heaven in 22:11, and the narrative gives way at once to speech. The story has been slowed to the speed of a single repeated name: Abraham, Abraham.

And fourth, resist the urge to fill the silences. The wayyiqtol chain gives you action and leaves out feeling on purpose. A sermon can say, rightly, that the narrator does not tell us what Abraham felt, and can invite the hearers to feel the weight of the bare verbs. That is reading the text. Supplying Abraham's inner thoughts as though Genesis had recorded them is writing a different text. Module 5 of this track returns to this, and so does the lesson on gaps in narrative there.

Open your verb table. Add a column headed Line. For every wayyiqtol in your passage, write M, for mainline. For every other verb, write O, for off the line, and in a few words say what that clause is doing: scene, background, back, meanwhile or speech.

Then, on a fresh page of your notebook, write out your passage's mainline: every M verb in order, in English, one per line, with its verse number. Read the list aloud. Underneath, write one sentence that tells the plot of your passage using only those verbs.

Next, choose the off-line clause in your passage that you think matters most, the one that sets the scene, gives the reader information a character lacks, or slows the story at a key moment. Copy it into your notebook, with the Hebrew word that comes before the verb and the verb's form, and write two sentences on what it adds to the story.

If your passage is poetry or a speech rather than narrative, you may find few wayyiqtols, or none. That is itself worth noting. Write how many you found, and then mark your perfects and imperfects with the time column from lesson 4 instead. If you would like the practice, do this week's exercise on Genesis 22:1-14 as well; it takes about twenty minutes and will make the next narrative passage you meet much easier to read.