“‘Verticality' in Biblical Hebrew Parallelism” (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Grammar of שׁ and אשׁר in Qohelet
Pp. 283-307 in The Words of the Wise Are like Goads: Engaging Qohelet in the 21st Century, ed. Mark J. Boda, Tremper Longman, III, and Cristian G. Rata. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns., 2013
Historical Linguistics, Editorial Theory, and Biblical Hebrew. The Current State of the Debate
Journal for Semitics, 2017
The question of diachronic change in Biblical Hebrew has been extensivelyexamined in recent years. This article has two parts. First, it reviews the currentstate of the debate in light of a special session devoted to the topic at the Societyof Biblical Hebrew and National Association of Professors of Hebrew in 2015.Special attention is given to the diachrony of Biblical Hebrew in light of ancientIndo-European languages, statistical methods for historical linguistics andeditorial theory. Second, it responds to a recent article of Rezetko (2016)concerning syntactic evidence for diachronic change in Qumran Hebrew (Naudé& Miller-Naudé 2016a) by providing additional evidence from the crosslinguisticnegative cycle and the negation of participles in Hebrew.
Addendum to Intermediate Biblical Hebrew Grammar, May 1, 2018
Unbeknownst to me while writing my intermediate grammar, the scholar Benjamin D. Suchard finished a dissertation at Leiden University (in September 2016) titled " The Development of the Biblical Hebrew Vowels. " Unfortunately, I only became aware of the dissertation after my manuscript was sent to the printer. Below, I have compiled a series of comments referring to Suchard's dissertation, oriented to the relevant place in my book.
The classical Hebrew verbal system represents one of the greatest problems of Semitic linguistics. The grammatical understanding of the Hebrew Bible tradition texts was forgotten already in the Middle Ages. Since then the biblical Hebrew verbal conjugations have remained a mystery (McFall 1982, 16). The theory that emerged among Jewish scholars was that the conjunc-tion we put before a finite verb had a ‘conversive’ function and thereby could transform this verbal form into another tense form. The verb for past tense, qatal, acquired with a prefixed we meanings that reminded of the senses of the other finite tense form (yiqtol). By analogy the con-junction wa (allomorph of we) was considered ‘converting’ yiqtol into a narrative past tense (wa-yiqtol). This “conversive theory” has been enormously influential on the sub-sequent scholarly discussion on the Hebrew verbal system and still dom-inates the text books on Biblical Hebrew. But seen in the perspective of the close relatives of Hebrew in Central Semitic and the second millennium Amarna Canaanite (Rainey 1996), we would rather expect Biblical Hebrew to behave as one of several first millennium daughter languages of early Canaanite. We would ex-pect that Biblical Hebrew had three basic finite verb forms (not four), two with prefixed inflection (short and long yiqtol) and one with suf-fixed inflection (qatal). Utterly few scholars have dared to maintain this concerning Biblical Hebrew (among the few are Tropper 1988; Van de Sandhe 2008; cf. Huehnergard 2005, 165). In the period between the Amarna age, and before the Old testament texts were created, there occurred in Proto-Hebrew and its Canaanite sister languages a phonological change that resulted in the loss of short final vowels. This in turn resulted in a subsequent morphological merger of the short and long prefix conjugations. The types yaqtul and yaqtulu both became yaqtul. This change occurred in all adjacent Northwest Semitic languages, Aramaic, Phoenician, Hebrew; but not, as far as we can understand in the earlier Ugaritic. The individual Northwest Semitic languages had to cope with this merger. The strategy that the speakers of Proto-Hebrew developed to retain the distinction between short form and long form was a limitation of word order. While word order in Amarna Canaanite was relatively free, Biblical Hebrew (even in the archaic poetry) relegated the short yiqtol to first position in the clause, whereas the long yiqtol was used in other positions (such as after a negation, or after a topicalized first ele-ment). Few Hebrew scholars have understood this restriction of word order in the light of a morphological merger (one of the few is Gzella 2011, 442; 2012, 101), and no one has tried to explain how the three basic conjugations of the Hebrew verbal system works in the light of this in-sight. It is the aim of the present paper to show how this word order con-straint worked to uphold the distinction between the short and the long yiqtol in Biblical Hebrew. The corpus consists of Genesis and Exodus and the so-called archaic poetry of the Hebrew Bible.
2014 Rezetko Young Historical Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
This book seeks to break fresh ground in research on the history of ancient Hebrew. Building on theoretical and methodological concepts in general historical linguistics and in diachronic linguistic research on various ancient Near Eastern and Indo-European languages, the authors reflect critically on issues such as the objective of the research, the nature of the written sources, and the ideas of variation and periodization. They draw on innovative work on premodern scribally created writings to argue for a similar application of a joint history of texts and history of language approach to ancient Hebrew. The application of cross-textual variable analysis and variationist analysis in various case studies shows that more complete descriptions and evaluations of the distribution of linguistic data advances our understanding of historical developments in ancient Hebrew.
Following the blueprint II: A new Biblical Hebrew syntactic outline derived from Harald Weinrich
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 2020
Following my critique of Niccacci's methodological stances, I establish a new interpretation of Biblical Hebrew word order derived from Harald Weinrich's Tempus. Its word order mirrors the opposition between comment and narrative registers. I describe the reasons for attributing a narrative function to the wayyiqtol and wqatal (verb-first) sentences while reserving the comment function to xqatal, xyiqtol, and xparticiple (verb-second) sentences. The occasional occurrence of a comment sentence in indirect speech is, in most cases, the syntactic mark of the narrator's addresses to the reader.