Non-recurrent Doubliets in the Book of Joel (original) (raw)

A Canonical-Critical Study of Selected Traditions in the Book of Joel

1992

The book of Joel presents a myriad of problems to the honest interpreter. For example, the inability to date firmly the book makes it exceedingly difficult to find an original meaning for the work. In addition, the failure of scholars to come to a consensus on the connection between the locust plague and the Day of Yahweh theme in the book exacerbates the interpretive problems further. This dissertation is an attempt to elucidate the meaning of the book of Joel by focusing on the Day of Yahweh and its subthemes in the book via the methodology of canonical criticism. Canonical criticism claims to offer a way out of the single original meaning impasse in interpreting a text. Brevard Childs solves the single meaning dilemma by transferring the authoritative meaning to the canonical meaning of the final form of the text as shaped and passed on by the believing community. James Sanders rejects any single meaning in the tradition process as normative and wants to catalog all the meanings and the hermeneutical process each believing community used to arrive at each meaning. When Sanders's method is applied to several stages iii of the book of Joel, it reveals a developing understanding of the Day of Yahweh in Joel by the believing communities from preexilic through intertestamental times. The Day changed from one of covenant curses (exemplified by the locust plague) to an eschatological Day when a teacher of righteousness would precede the apocalyptic salvation of Judah. Although the canonical-critical method offers some fresh understanding of Joel by focusing on canonical readings, it does not solve the hermeneutical dilemma because it is dependent on historical-critical method as well for its readings of the book. Further, Sanders's method merely replaces the difficulty of finding the original meaning of a text with the problem of choosing between several hypothetical meanings of a text. iv

Marked word order in the book of Joel

The function of BH word order (or more specifically clause constituent order) patterns has received considerable attention during the last two decades. Recently, Lunn (2006) provided an innovative explanation of how the relative frequently occurring instances of fronting and double fronting in poetic texts could be explained. In this paper marked constituent order patterns in the book of Joel are analyzed in terms of the information structure of the strophes and stanzas in which they occur in order to determine whether Lunn's model also applies to the poetry of the book Joel. Using their own semantic-pragmatic model for explaining constituent order, the authors establish that, on the one hand their findings concur with those of Lunn, but on the other hand, they do not need to resort to the "uniquely poetic" principles formulated by Lunn.

Repetition Indicating Form and Function: A Rhetorical Critical Case Study in Leviticus 23

Hiphil Novum, 2020

It has long been observed that the repetition of literary devices has been used in the Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature for the purpose of structuring the text and connecting related pericopes. The work done more recently under the TAPJLA project, labels the structuring aspect of repetition: "Repetitions as markers of architecture." Also, the innovative work of Moshe Kline suggests that literary repetition has been used systematically in two-dimensional structuring of the Torah. This paper builds on these insights, together with elements of my own thesis on the rhetoric of Leviticus. It models an inductive, synchronic case study of a literary unit (Leviticus 23), to show how repetitions have been used both in the form and in the function of the unit, for composition and for suasion.

314. “Textual Harmonization in the Five Books of the Torah: A Summary,” The Bible, Qumran, and the Samaritans, ed. Magnar Kartveit and Gerald Knoppers, STDJ 104, STS 10 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 31–56.

The five books of the Torah share a special phenomenon that is unusual within the Hebrew Bible: all five of them feature exactly the same textual characteristics despite containing different content genres. As strange as it may sound, harmonization is the most central textual feature in a large group of textual witnesses of the Torah, appearing in the LXX, the SP (Samaritan Pentateuch), and several Hebrew manuscripts, but not in the Masoretic Text (MT). This situation implies that several witnesses of these five books underwent the same type of textual development , which is understandable as they form one unit. It should be pointed out that textual harmonization is not a natural or expected phenomenon, but it developed nevertheless in certain texts. What is unusual is that this phenomenon is prominent in the Torah and not in the other Scripture books that probably provide more occasion for harmonization.