Linguistic Motivation and Biblical Exegesis (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Application of Modern Linguistics to Biblical Hebrew Exegesis
2019
How is modern linguistic theory impacting the exegesis of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament? By looking primarily at the Biblical Hebrew beginning, intermediate, and reference grammars of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, the way modern linguistics is being applied to the grammatical interpretation of the Old Testament text in the original Hebrew is surveyed. In general, there is a trend away from prescriptive, Latin-based grammar in works that use modern linguistics. This work also offers an introduction to the application of modern linguistic theory and a starting point for anyone interested in utilizing modern linguistics to understand how Biblical Hebrew works.
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.
The present paper aims at designing a more accurate and richer model applying the grammaticalization approach to the synchronic study of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system. This new proposal-based on the dynamic description of languages and on the panchronic methodology, which are both necessary consequences of the grammaticalization framework, path and chaos theories, as well as of several principles of cognitive linguistics-constitutes an extension and improvement of the model formulated by John A. Cook. In 2002, J. A. Cook employed grammaticalization laws as the explanatory vehicle of the Biblical Hebrew verbal formations presenting a model which, being based on the findings of the grammaticalization and path theories, went beyond a purely diachronic perspective. However, the contrastive analysis of Cook's proposal with the requirements of the dynamic evolutionary view of languages demonstrates that this first application of the grammaticalization and path theories to the synchronic study of the Biblical Hebrew verb fails to comply with all the prerequisites derived from the two approaches. In light of this, the outline of an exemplary, second generation, model of the improvement will be sketched which in a more truthful manner takes into account the exigencies of the theories related to evolutionary linguistics.