Perfective of Confidence or Prophetic Perfect
One of the lectionary passages for this week is Isaiah 9:1-4. Those who don’t know Hebrew may miss out on an interest fact about this passage. It is one of the best examples of what is called the “prophetic perfect” or the “perfectum propheticum” for those who really like Latin titles. I got used to them in the years I used Gesenius-Kautzsch as my primary reference grammar.
Bruce Waltke (An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, 30.5.1e/p. 490) does discuss this briefly and uses Isaiah 8-9 as an example. In fact, he points out the nice transition in Isaiah 8:23 in which both “humbled” and “honored” are in the perfect tense, and yet the first refers to the past and the second to the future. The passage continues with a series of perfect verbs talking about the future. I prefer to quote Gesenius, however:
The prophet so transports himself in imagination into the future that he describes the future event as if it had been already seen or heard by him . . .
The he cites our passage amongst others.
What was interesting was that I noticed this passage the same day I was reading about hope in commentary on Hebrews. There St. John Chrysostom comments that “through hope we are already in heaven.”
Does our Christian imagination, or our Christian hope suffice to make it seem that we are already in heaven? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get that sense of already being there in God’s promises?