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I'm a beginning exegete and I'm trying to determine, are the prayer requests of 1 Kings 8:31-52 grammatically subordinate to the "requests" of 1 Kings 1:25-26?

Verses 25-26 where Solomon asks God to "keep" and "confirm" are Qal Imperatives. However, all the specific requests of the rest of the prayer are in the Qal Qatal (Perfect) 2nd-person. Does this mean the requests in Qal Qatal 2ms are ways by which God fulfills the imperative prayer requests?

Its very possible I could be reading too far into something that is just incidental and has no exegetical significance whatsoever.

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    – agarza
    Sep 3 at 22:57

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Sorry, but I do not understand what you ask for. The Solomon's requests mentioned in 1 Kin 8:31-52 are vary variegated. As for some examples we find the following requests' types (toward God), to act: as a judge (between righteous and wicked men) [verses 31-32], as a recoverer of His people from his enemies [verses 33-34], as a fine wheather restorer [verses 35-36], as a food-giver [verses 37-40], and so on. So, do you refer to a particular request included in these 22 verses?

Moreover, there is no 'grammatical' link between the two passages (very distant one to another, also). Bible Hebrew language may fix some links between passages through other non-grammatical systems, as poetic device (parallelism, chiasmus, et cetera), or - simply - with the use of redundancy, namely, the repeating of a concept with different terms. Similarly, the use of the perfect/imperfect variables - too - do not affect at all on a supposed subordination existing between the two texts you mentioned.

I suggest you to focus better your question.

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  • What I was meaning is all these verses are part of one prayer. I'm not sure why you say they are different texts (even if you wanted to get form-critical, the final composition still has them juxtaposed). I was simply asking if there was a particular reason the beginning requests of the prayer are imperative while the rest are in the 2nd-person perfect or if its just happenstance/no meaning to it whatsoever.
    – Gravada
    Oct 1 at 17:53

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