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 pages of the Hebrew Bible are filled with stories - short and long, funny and sad, histories, fables, and morality tales. The ancient narrators used a variety of stylistic devices to structure, to connect, and to separate their tales - and thus to establish contexts within which meaning comes to light. What are these devices, and how do they guide our reading and our understanding of the text? Style and Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative explores some of the answers and shows scriptural interpretation can be a matter of style." Part one of Style and Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative examines a wide variety of symmetrical patterns biblical Hebrew narrative uses to organize its units and subunits, and the interpretive dynamics those patterns can imply. Part two addresses the question of boundaries between literary units. Part three examines devices that biblical Hebrew narrative uses to connect consecutive literary units and subunits. Chapters in Part One: Structures of Organization are "Reverse Symmetry," "Forward Symmetry," "Alternating Repetition," "Partial Symmetry," "Multiple Symmetry," "Asymmetry." Chapters in Part Two: Structures of Disjunction are "Narrative Components," "Repetition," and "Narrative Sequence." Chapters in Part Three: Structures of Conjunction are "Threads," "Links: Examples," "Linked Threads: Examples," "Hinges: Examples," and "Double-Duty Hinges: Examples." Jerome T. Walsh, PhD, is a professor of theology and religious studies at the University of Botswana. He is the author of 1 Kings in the Berit Olam (The Everlasting Covenant) Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry series for which he is also an associate editor. "

In 1961 William L. Morgan published "The Hebrew Language in Its Northwest Semitic Background", in which he presented a state-of-the-art description of the linguistic milieu out of which Biblical Hebrew developed. Moran stressed the features found in earlier Northwest Semitic languages that are similar to Hebrew and he demonstrated how the study of those languages sheds light on Biblical Hebrew. Since Moran wrote, our knowledge of both the Hebrew of the biblical period and of Northwest Semitic has increased considerably. In the lights of new epigraphic finds and the significant advances in the fields of Biblical Hebrew and Northwest Semitic in the past four decades, the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem convened an international research group during the 2001-2002 academic year on the topic "Biblical Hebrew in Its Northwest Semitic setting: Typological and Historical Perspectives." The volume presents the fruits of the year-long collaboration and contains twenty articles based on lectures given during the year by members of the groups and invited guests. A wide array of subjects are discussed, all of which have implications for the study of Biblical Hebrew and Northwest Semitic.

From celebrated translator of the Hebrew Bible Robert Alter, the "groundbreaking" (Los Angeles Times) book that explores the Bible as literature, a winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Renowned critic and translator Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative has radically expanded our view of the Bible by recasting it as a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In this seminal work, Alter describes how the Hebrew Bible's many authors used innovative literary styles and devices such as parallelism, contrastive dialogue, and narrative tempo to tell one of the most revolutionary stories of all time: the revelation of a single God. In so doing, Alter shows, these writers reshaped not only history, but also the art of storytelling itself.

Introduces basic and critical issues of Hebrew syntax for beginning and intermediate readers of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

This introduces and abridges the syntactical features of the original language of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. Scholars have made significant progress in recent decades in understanding Biblical Hebrew syntax. Yet intermediate readers seldom have access to this progress due to the technical jargon and sometimes-obscure locations of the scholarly publications. This Guide is an intermediate-level reference grammar for Biblical Hebrew. As such, it assumes an understanding of elementary phonology and morphology, and defines and illustrates the fundamental syntactical features of Biblical Hebrew that most intermediate-level readers struggle to master. The volume divides Biblical Hebrew syntax, and to a lesser extent morphology, into four parts. The first three cover the individual words (nouns, verbs, and particles) with the goal of helping the reader move from morphological and syntactical observations to meaning and significance. The fourth section moves beyond phase-level phenomena and considers the larger relationships of clauses and sentences.

During the past century, numerous books and articles have appeared on the verbal system of Semitic languages. Thanks to the discovery of Ugaritic texts, Akkadian tablets, Canaanite letters found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, our understanding of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the Semitic languages has increased substantially. Dallaire focuses primarily on prose texts in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite in which the verbal system (morphemes, syntax) expresses nuances of wishes, desires, requests, and commands. According to her, volitional concepts are found in every language and are expressed through verbal morphemes, syntagmas, intonation, syntax, and other linguistic means. The Syntax of Volitives in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite Prose attempts to answer the following questions: Do volitives function in a similar way in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite? Where and why is there overlap in morphology and syntax between these two languages? What morphological and syntactical differences exist between the volitional expressions of the languages? In attempting to answer these questions, the author bears in mind the fact that, within each of these two languages, scribes from different areas used specific dialectal and scribal traditions (for example, northern versus southern, peripheral versus central).

This book proposes a methodological framework for an ethical reading of Old Testament narrative and demonstrates its benefits and validity by providing an exemplary reading of the story of Josiah in Kings. Part One delineates the meaning of "ethical reading" practised in the work. The theoretical framework is critically adopted from Martha Nussbaum. This approach to ethics does not extract general rules out of story, rather it allows the reader to appreciate the world of the story itself, which is analogous with real life. Part Two expounds "synchronic literary criticism anchored in discourse analysis" and elucidates its use for ethical reading of Old Testament narrative. Part Three offers exemplary ethical readings and shows how discourse analysis can help the literary issues such as plot delimitation and characterisation. Through the ethical commentary of the story of Josiah, the theme of contingency in life can be noticed to prevail in the story. When contingency in life is accepted as a real part of the human moral life, understanding of ethics should be enlarged so that it may be coped with properly. Here ethics is understood in terms of practical wisdom that can be used for ethical improvisation for ever-changing situations. The particularities in Old Testament narrative are useful features that make the reader perceptive to the complexity of life and thus train practical wisdom; and the literary and discourse-analytical approach makes the most of the genre-characteristics of Old Testament narrative, which realistically reflects the complexity of moral life.

In its examination of parenthesis in Biblical Hebrew, this book presents a linguistic description of Biblical Hebrew parenthetical units through integration of several research disciplines and scholarly approaches: linguistics, discourse studies, text linguistics, textual philology, comparative Semitics, Bible translations, and literature.

This book constitutes the first detailed corpus-based analysis of the verbal morphology and syntax employed in the Eastern European Maskilic (Jewish Enlightenment) Hebrew prose fiction written between 1857 and 1881. This verbal system exhibits biblical, rabbinic and medieval elements as well as unprecedented features and similarities to Israeli Hebrew and Yiddish. The first section of the work offers a selective examination of maskilic verbal morphology, while the second section constitutes a thorough examination of the functions of the verbal conjugations and the third section surveys selected features of verbal syntax. The work fills a serious gap in the Hebrew philological literature and will therefore be of great relevance to students and scholars of diachronic Hebrew language and linguistics.