Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible

Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible
Author: Ellen van Wolde
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004497528

Biblical Hebrew grammar was until recently concentrated on the morpho-syntax within sentence boundaries. In the past few decades text-syntactic theories have been developed. At the conference Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible (Tilburg 1996) six eminent scholars presented both a paper on Hebrew syntax and a workshop in which Exodus 19-24 or 1 Samuel 1 was studied. Both kinds of contributions are collected in this volume. They tend to lead towards one conclusion: traditional sentence-grammar and text-syntactic studies should not exclude, but include each other. The verb forms, word-order and other syntactic features need to be studied as functioning at more than one level. A combination of a morpho-syntactic study at the sentence level and a text-syntactic approach is thus defended. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

The (In)Coherence of Divine Mercy

The (In)Coherence of Divine Mercy
Author: Ian B. Turner
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2024-10-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004699600

How do texts of Scripture make sense or hold together as a unity? This question is especially germane to the Masoretic Text of Hosea, which is often seen as an unintegrated composition by some, or an artful literary whole by others. Such judgments often come without clear definitions and criteria for (in)coherence. This book brings descriptive clarity to this issue through a discourse analysis of cohesion and coherence in Hosea 12–14 based on Systemic Functional Linguistics. This study showcases the theme of divine mercy in Hosea 12–14 and gives readers tools for discourse-linguistic analysis of the Hebrew Bible.

New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew

New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew
Author: Aaron D. Hornkohl
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 806
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1800641664

Most of the papers in this volume originated as presentations at the conference Biblical Hebrew and Rabbinic Hebrew: New Perspectives in Philology and Linguistics, which was held at the University of Cambridge, 8–10th July, 2019. The aim of the conference was to build bridges between various strands of research in the field of Hebrew language studies that rarely meet, namely philologists working on Biblical Hebrew, philologists working on Rabbinic Hebrew and theoretical linguists. This volume is the published outcome of this initiative. It contains peer-reviewed papers in the fields of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew that advance the field by the philological investigation of primary sources and the application of cutting-edge linguistic theory. These include contributions by established scholars and by students and early career researchers.

Ancient Texts and Modern Readers

Ancient Texts and Modern Readers
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2019-06-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004402918

The chapters of this volume address a variety of topics that pertain to modern readers’ understanding of ancient texts, as well as tools or resources that can facilitate contemporary audiences’ interpretation of these ancient writings and their language. In this regard, they cover subjects related to the fields of ancient Hebrew linguistics and Bible translation. The chapters apply linguistic insights and theories to elucidate elements of ancient texts for modern readers, investigate how ancient texts help modern readers to interpret features in other ancient texts, and suggest ways in which translations can make the language and conceptual worlds of ancient texts more accessible to modern readers. In so doing, they present the results of original research, identify new lines and topics of inquiry, and make novel contributions to modern readers’ understanding of ancient texts. Contributors are Alexander Andrason, Barry L. Bandstra, Reinier de Blois, Lénart J. de Regt, Gideon R. Kotzé, Geoffrey Khan, Christian S. Locatell, Kristopher Lyle, John A. Messarra, Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé, Jacobus A. Naudé, Daniel Rodriguez, Eep Talstra, Jeremy Thompson, Cornelius M. van den Heever, Herrie F. van Rooy, Gerrit J. van Steenbergen, Ernst Wendland, Tamar Zewi.

Advances in the Study of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic

Advances in the Study of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic
Author: Benjamin J. Noonan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-02-18
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0310596017

Advances in the Study of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic by Benjamin J. Noonan examines issues of interest in the current world of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic scholarship and their impact on understanding the Old Testament; it provides an accessible introduction for students, pastors, professors, and commentators to understand these important issues.

The Literary Coherence of the Book of Micah

The Literary Coherence of the Book of Micah
Author: Kenneth H. Cuffey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2015-02-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567001644

The Literary Coherence of the Book of Micah puts forth a framework to understand the nature of literary coherence. This enables an analysis of the sources and dimensions of the coherence found in the book of Micah by the primary scholarly proposals for understanding the structure and connectedness of the whole book. Each of these proposals ultimately fails to account for all the features found in the text. The author then explains a new reading of the final form of the text of Micah, based on the placement of the references concerning the remnant. A brief exposition of the text as a canonical whole indicates the flow and development in the final form of the book. The framework formulated earlier provides a basis to evaluate the coherence that this understanding of the book of Micah uncovers and to show that this means of reading the canonical book best accounts for the greatest number of features in the text.

Text-Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew

Text-Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
Author: David Allan Dawson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2015-01-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1474236146

Modern linguistics is a relative newcomer in the scientific world, and text-linguistics, or discourse analysis, is one of its youngest disciplines. This fact has inclined many toward scepticism of its value for the Hebraist, yet much benefit is thereby overlooked. In this work, the author examines recent contributions to Hebrew text-linguistics by Niccacci, Andersen, Eskhult, Khan, and Longacre, evaluating them against a twofold standard of theoretical and methodological integrity, and clarity of communication. An extensive introduction to one particularly promising model of text analysis (from Longacre's tagmemic school) is given, and a step-by-step methodology is presented. Analyses according to this model and methodology are given of seven extended text samples, each building on the findings of the previous analyses: Judg. 2; Lev. 14.1-32; Lev. 6.1-7.37; parallel instructions and historical reports about the building of the Tabernacle, from Exodus 25-40; Judg. 10.6-12.7; and the book of Ruth in its entirety. Considerable attention is given to the question of text-linguistics and reported speech.

Roles and Relations in Biblical Law

Roles and Relations in Biblical Law
Author: Christian Canu Højgaard
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2024-05-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1805111515

Leviticus 17–26, an ancient law text known as the Holiness Code, prescribes how particular persons are to behave in concrete, everyday situations. The addressees of the law text must revere their parents, respect the elderly, fear God, take care of their fellow, provide for the sojourner, and so on. The sojourner has his own obligations, as do the priests. Even God is said to behave in various ways towards various persons. Thus, the law text forms an intricate web of persons and interactions. There is a growing awareness that ancient law texts were not arbitrary collections of legal paragraphs but articulations of certain world views. The laws were rational in their own respect and were based on the lawgiver’s ethos. However, since the ethical values of the lawgiver rarely—if ever—surface in the text itself, it has proven difficult to grasp with traditional, exegetical methods. This study offers a novel approach to mapping out the ethos of an ancient law text like Leviticus 17–26. By employing social network analysis, the participants and their interactions are mapped to scrutinize the ethical roles embodied by the persons of the law. To accomplish this, the study undertakes meticulous research into both the participants and the interactions of Leviticus 17–26. The book investigates a semi-automatic approach to extracting participant information from a text and offers new methods for analysing Hebrew interactions (realised as verbal predicates) in terms of dynamicity, causation, and agency.

Diversity in Pre-Exilic Hebrew

Diversity in Pre-Exilic Hebrew
Author: Ian Young
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2011
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9783161516764

In this splendid work the reader is introduced to a re-evaluation of the nature of 'Biblical Hebrew'. The author suggests a new model for understanding the north-western Semitic dialects in general and the Hebrew in particular. [a] This is a highly recommended work for scholars and students interested in the history and development of Hebrew as part of the northwestern Semitic languages.C A P van Tonder in Old Testament Essays 8:2 (1995), pp. 302-303 This is an important book, not only for scholars concerned with the history of the Hebrew language but also for those investigating dating and background of Old Testament literature. It is thought-provoking and reflects an impressive erudition.Geoffrey Khan in Vetus Testamentum XLVII (1997), no. 3, pp. 409-412 Young's theory is provocative and far-reaching. It comprehends a large amount of evidence with an elegantly simple explanation.Marsha White in Journal of Biblical Literature 11 (1997), pp. 730-732

Language and Interpretation in the Syriac Text of Ben Sira

Language and Interpretation in the Syriac Text of Ben Sira
Author: Willem Th. van Peursen
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2007-12-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9047423615

This book is the result of an innovative linguistic study of the Syriac translation of Ben Sira. It contains both a traditional philological analysis, incorporating matters of text-historical interest and translation technique, and also the results of a computational linguistic analysis of phrases, clauses and texts. It arrives at new linguistic insights, including a proposal for a corpus-based description of phrase structure based on a so-called maximum matrix. The book also addresses the fundamentally different way in which a text is approached in a computer-assisted analysis compared with the way in which this is done in traditional philological approaches. It demonstrates how the computer-assisted analysis can fruitfully shed light on or supplement traditional philological research.