A simple example is the term “consecutive preterite” in Jo Ann Hackett’s Hebrew grammar. In the preface (“How to Use This Book”) she explains that, “Several years ago, John Huehnergard and I together came up with the term ‘consecutive preterite’ for the verb form that is usually called the ‘converted imperfect’ (2010: xx). When I first read that statement in a blog review, it struck me as an unlikely to be “new” term. A quick Google search turned up the following cases of this term, admittedly predating Hackett’s use by far enough to have been all but forgotten:

“vav-consecutive preterite” (William Green, A Grammar of the Hebrew Language 1889, p. 334)
“consecutive preterite” (Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Prophecies of Isaiah 1892, vol. 1 p. 94)
“consecutive preterite” (G. R. Driver, Problems of the Hebrew Verbal System 1936, p. 138)

More serious cases of forgetfulness, however, are those in which whole ideas or theories are overlooked as having been tried and found wanting. This seems to be the case for Elizabeth Robar’s recent JSS article “Wayyiqṭol as an Unlikely Preterite.” Robar’s basic argument is that wayyiqtol is “a narrative present, that is, a relative present (deriving past time reference from the narrative’s reference time) with perfective aspect” (2013: 34). This argument is not substantially different from S. R. Driver’s defunct analysis of ויאמר as “and-he-proceeded-to-say.” Although there are some nuanced differences, Hughes (1970: 17) correctly identified Driver’s understanding of the wayyiqtol as an “historical present,” and Robar (2013: 34 n. 18) gives passing notice that her ideas track with Driver’s (1998: 27) and Zevit’s (1988: 31). And there is good reason that Driver’s historical-present analysis of wayyiqtol was never widely adopted, foremost of which is that Bauer shortly thereafter (1910) advanced the theory that wayyiqtol preserved a prefixed preterite common Semitic conjugation, perserved as such in Akkadian. It is hard to understand how Robar’s comparison of Biblical Hebrew wayyiqtol to the “neo-Semitic” modern Aramaic dialects could be more plausible than the preterite connection based on historical-comparative study of ancient Semitic.

But further, the details of Robar’s case are problematic at every turn, illustrating that the historical present explanation continues to be untenable. Her handful of “irregularities” such as ויעשׂה instead of the expected apocopated ויעשׂ in 1 Kgs 14:9 do not prove that morphologically the wayyiqtol form is “part of the same paradigm as yiqtol,” even as her footnote of caveats demonstrates (2013: 33 and n. 17). Her comments on syntax are apparently an effort to demonstrate that wayyiqtol does not act like many preterites do in other languages; but she thereby neglects to factor in that it is a NARRATIVE preterite (that it does not appear in relative or other subordinate clauses does not argue against it being a preterite but supports its identification as a NARRATIVE form). At the same time, however, she conveniently appeals to its narrative status to defend restricted role as a narrative PRESENT (2013: 25, 34). The examples of non-preterite meaning for wayyiqtol are all unconvincing: not a single one of them demands a non-preterite rendering (e.g., even 2 Sam 14:5 makes perfect sense as ‘A widow am I, my husband DIED’ not ‘IS DEAD’). It is hardly a boost to her argument that her “clearest example of a non-preterite wayyiqtol” comes from Job 14:16–17—as if the verb TAM of Job is clear otherwise! But even if such examples as this last are granted her as problematic, she refuses to entertain the possibility that the partial homonymy of the past narrative wayyiqtol and imperfective yiqtol paradgims perhaps may have led to periodic confusion among the tens of thousands of occurrences of the conjugations in the Hebrew Bible!

Theoretically Robar’s ideas fly in the face of common wisdom in linguistic studies of TAM (tense-aspect-mood systems). First, her identification of wayyiqtol as a perfective aspect, present tense form is extremely odd (2013: 34): quite a few linguists claim that there is a fundamental incompatibility between perfective aspect and present tense (see Bache 1995: 289; Bhat 1999: 17; Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994: 126; Smith 1997: 185), apart from the notable exception that proves the rule of reportative speech (e.g., Jones runs to third base; C. S. Smith 1997: 185; see Cook 2012: 74). However, such highly marked and limited exceptions cannot provide any precedent for as extensive of a “narrative present” usage as wayyiqtol, according to Robar’s theory, would represent.

Second, her use of Fleishmann’s (1990) work requires significant nuancing (2013: 32 n. 15) to the point of appearing to be a case of special pleading. However, at the same time, Robar ignores the significant conclusions Fleishmann arrives at that are contrary to her theory of wayyiqtol, to wit, that the use of the narrative present is inherently unstable and runs contrary to the normal rules of narration (1990: 309–10). As Fludernick (1996: 188) puts it, the extensive use of the narrative present “is not ‘real’ narrative.” Unsurprisingly, such narrative strategies that flout the norm of narration are largely a modernist invention.

All this suggest that at most Robar’s discussion raises the prospect of an already defunct theory as a “what if . . .” and does not in any way advance Driver’s case or substantiate it as in any way superior to the well-grounded comparative-historical argument dating back to Bauer in its most basic form. Such a judgment is in keeping with some basic-sense observations by linguistics about narrative or historical presents: first, historical presents do not generally begin narratives (Fludernick 1996: 187), concerning on which Robar can provide no better answer than GKC (1910: §111) with respect to books and distinct narrative sections beginning with wayyiqtol (e.g., Ruth 1:1; Jonah 1:1; Gen 22:1); second, the narrative present, Fludernick (1996: 189–190) argues, is essentially non-deictic, collapsing a variety of tenses into itself. And yet, in Biblical Hebrew, present-tense pronouncements by the narrator appear in the midst of narrative and are clearly distinguishable from the surrounding narrative events (Gen 19:37–38; Deut 34:25–38). Such is the case because no case can be made for wayyiqtol being a present-tense conjugation, and thus, in its role as a NARRATIVE verb (a point on which Robar and I can agree), etymology aside, it functions according to the usual rules of narrative: it reports past events that contrast with past-perfect, present, and future backgrounded events.

Another sort of recycling involves an almost manufactured problem to solve, such as one finds in the new JBL article on the “problem” of time in Joel 2 by Ronald Troxel. Though there is no dearth of modern scholars who discount verb tenses in poetry and prophetic books (so Barton 2001 on Joel), much of Troxel’s literature review is an interesting rehashing of nineteenth debates on Joel 2. A primary conclusion Troxel arrives at is that the Past Narrative forms in Joel 2:18–19 do indeed express a past narrative, and though the ASV translates otherwise, he is in good company with his conclusion, with the NRSV, NJPS, Keil and Delitzsch, and the translators of the KJV (1611)!

But of course Troxel deals with more than just these two verses. He analyzes the poetic description of the locust plague/Yhwh’s army in 2:3–11, concluding that the alternation of Imperfect and Perfect forms is quite reasonably within their traditionally recognized role of gnomic expressions. It is a bit disappointing both (1) that Troxel did not bother to read more carefully my article in the volume he edited (Cook 2005) in which I dismiss such cavelier treatement of gnomic perfects as overly simplistic, and (2) that his discussion is not more straightforward than it is.

Certainly he is right to draw attention as he does to the word order: more than half of the clauses (and poetic stichs) in 2:3-11 begin with a prepositional phrase, clearly departing from the basic word order of BH regardless of one’s theoretical stance on the issue. However, the Perfect forms in this passage are hardly troublesome, especially if instead of treating as some gnomic/habitual description, as Troxel does, one compares it with vision reports (e.g., Habakkuk 3). Thus the Perfects largely serve to express present states, whether with stative lexemes or by virtue a present perfect interpretation. Consider my (woodenly literal) renderings of those verses with a Perfect verb (marked in italics):

לְפָנָיו אָכְלָה אֵשׁ וְאַחֲרָיו תְּלַהֵט לֶהָבָה

‘Before it fire has devoured;
after it flame licks/is licking’. (v. 3a)

מִפָּנָיו יָחִילוּ עַמִּים כָּל־פָּנִים קִבְּצוּ פָארוּר׃

‘Before it the people writhe/are writhing;
all the faces have gathered pale’. (v. 6) 

לְפָנָיו רָגְזָה אֶרֶץ רָעֲשׁוּ שָׁמָיִם
שֶׁמֶשׁ וְיָרֵחַ קָדָרוּ וְכוֹכָבִים אָסְפוּ נָגְהָם׃
וַיהוָה נָתַן קוֹלוֹ לִפְנֵי חֵילוֹ

‘Before it earth is (become) agitated;
the heavens have quaked.(?)
The sun and moon have become darkened,
and the stars have withdrawn their light.
And Yhwh has given his voice before his army (v. 10-11a)

Only the one instance of רעשׁו in Joel 2:10 can in any sense be called problematic, especially if we compare it with the similar descriptive passage in Jeremiah 4, in which רעשׁ appears as a participle (Jer 4:24). But it is useful to compare the entire descriptive passage (Jer 4:23–26), in which the Perfect forms are employed in a similar pattern as Joel 2, alternating with null-copula clauses: the null-copula expressions are interpreted as past temporal reference within the narrative framing Perfect ראיתי, and the descriptive Perfects are interpreted as past perfects, i.e., past-time state resulting from a previous event (again, Perfects are in italics).

‏ רָאִיתִי אֶת־הָאָרֶץ וְהִנֵּה־תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְאֶל־הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵין אוֹרָם׃
‏ רָאִיתִי הֶהָרִים וְהִנֵּה רֹעֲשִׁים וְכָל־הַגְּבָעוֹת הִתְקַלְקָלוּ׃
‏ רָאִיתִי וְהִנֵּה אֵין הָאָדָם וְכָל־עוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם נָדָדוּ׃
‎‏ רָאִיתִי וְהִנֵּה הַכַּרְמֶל הַמִּדְבָּר וְכָל־עָרָיו נִתְּצוּ מִפְּנֵי יְהוָה מִפְּנֵי חֲרוֹן אַפּוֹ׃ ס

I looked at the land, and hey, (it was) empty and void,
(I looked) to the heavens, and their light was no more.
I looked at the mountains, and hey, (they were) quaking;
and all the hills had been shaken.†
I looked, and hey, there was no one;
and all the birds of the heavens had fled.
I looked, and hey, the fertile land (was) a wilderness,
and all its cities *had been torn down* before the Yhwh, before the wrath of his anger. (Jer 4:23-26)

†Note: The interpretation of this verb (the only occurrence of hitpalpel of קל ‘be light, trifling’) is uncertain, but the sense may easily be past perfect, that the hills have proven no match for the quaking of the oncoming army.

The patterns Troxel notes in Joel 2 are therefore not all that surprising or difficult. But more importantly, the TAM for the verbs are not simply in the vague, grey overlapping region of “gnomic” but well within their “normal” TAM range of meanings. In other words, we need not wrestle with this as an example of how poetry departs radically from the prose grammar—except perhaps in word order!

Recycling may be good for the environment, but in scholarship simply recycling ideas and remanufacturing issues once solved is wasteful and does little to advance our knowledge other than perhaps through the need to refute such work. Quite unfortunately, this problem is not new, as it calls to mind the following century-old statement as somewhat apropos:

Every decade or half decade sees a new book upon the subject; the
same authors are ransacked; the same evidence is marshaled; the same
references and footnotes are transferred, like stale tea-leaves, from
one learned receptacle to another. (pp. 1-2)
from Alfred Zimmern, “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labor?” Sociological Review 1909.

References
Bache, Carl
1995 The Study of Tense, Aspect and Action. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Barton, John
2001 Joel and Obadiah: A Commentary. 1st ed. The Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press.

Bauer, Hans
1910 Die Tempora im Semitischen. Beiträge zur Assyriologie und semitischen Sprachwissenschaft 81: 1–53.

Bhat, D. N. S.
1999 The Prominence of Tense, Aspect, and Mood. Studies in Language Companion Series. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca
1994 The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cook, John A.
2005 Genericity, Tense, and Verbal Patterns in the Sentence Literature of Proverbs. Pp. 117–33 in Seeking Out the Wisdom of the Ancients: Essays Offered to Honor Michael V. Fox on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Ronald L. Troxel, Kelvin G. Friebel, and Dennis R. Magary. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns

2012 Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: the Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

Driver, S. R.
[1892] 1998 A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew and Some Other Syntactical Questions. 3d ed. Reprint, with an introductory essay by W. Randall Garr. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Fleischman, Suzanne
1990 Tense and Narrativity. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Fludernik, Monika.
1996 Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.

Gesenius, W. and G. Kautzsch
1910 Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar. A. E. Cowley ed. Oxford: Oxford University.

Hackett, Jo Ann.
2010 A Basic Introduction to Biblical Hebrew. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson.

Hughes, James A.
1970 Another Look at the Hebrew Tenses. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 29: 12–24.

Keil, Carl Friedrich and Franz Delitzsch
1989 [1892] Commentary on the Old Testament. Translated by James Martin. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson.

Robar, Elizabeth
2013 Wayyiqṭol as an Unlikely Preterite. Journal of Semitic Studies 58/1: 21–42.

Smith, Carlota S.
1997 The Parameter of Aspect. 2d ed. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

Troxel, Ronald L.
2013 The Problem of Time in Joel 2. Journal of Biblical Literature 132/1: 77–95.

Zevit, Ziony
1988 Talking Funny in Biblical Henglish and Solving a Problem of the Yaqtúl Past Tense. Hebrew Studies 29: 25–33.

(1) Gen 1:1

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

He and his students have been working through the various issues, and reading my VT article and some older posts I made here and here, and they came up with a fascinating question: does the disjunctive accent on ראשׁית (which is a טפחא) provide any support for taking the word as the free or bound form?

Now, I must admit that while I have read by the טעמים since my first year of graduate school (when I learned how they worked and how to chant them from Michael Fox), I don’t claim to understand all the subtleties of their patterns. I’m fairly sure that B. Elan Dresher’s argument that they are essentially prosodic is right, or at least, heading in the right direction. But beyond that, I’m not always sure what the טעמים are indicating.

The question by Professor Turner is the second טעם question in two weeks. The first one was by Professor Gary Rendsburg (Rutgers), who asked me about the possible relative use of זה in Exod 13.8, given in (2).

(2) Exod 13.8

וְהִגַּדְתָּ֣ לְבִנְךָ֔ בַּיּ֥וֹם הַה֖וּא לֵאמֹ֑ר בַּעֲב֣וּר זֶ֗ה עָשָׂ֤ה יְהוָה֙ לִ֔י בְּצֵאתִ֖י מִמִּצְרָֽיִם׃

The problem here, as in Gen 1.1, is the presence of a disjunctive accent (in this case, a רביע) on the word in question. The two issues are closely related: 1) can a bound word carry a disjunctive accent?, and 2) can the relative element carry a disjunctive accent?

Using the powerful yet easy-to-use Accordance Bible software and the Westminster tagged text, I performed two simple searches, the first for a bound noun with a טפחא, the second for אשׁר with a טפחא. The results for each were determinative: 2301 examples of a bound noun with טפחא, as in (3), occur in Westminster’s electronic Leningrad text and 251 examples of אשׁר with טפחא occur, as in (4).

(3) Gen 1.20

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ הַמַּ֔יִם שֶׁ֖רֶץ נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה וְעוֹף֙ יְעוֹפֵ֣ף עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ עַל־פְּנֵ֖י רְקִ֥יעַ הַשָּׁמָֽיִם׃

(4) Gen 1.7

‏ וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִים֮ אֶת־הָרָקִיעַ֒ וַיַּבְדֵּ֗ל בֵּ֤ין הַמַּ֙יִם֙ אֲשֶׁר֙ מִתַּ֣חַת לָרָקִ֔יעַ וּבֵ֣ין הַמַּ֔יִם אֲשֶׁ֖ר מֵעַ֣ל לָרָקִ֑יעַ וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן׃

It seems clear to me that the pattern of the טעם depends on the prosodic features of the context before and especially after the bound noun or אשׁר. That is, if what follows is considered to be a tighter prosodic unit, as with ברא אלהים in Gen 1.1, then those two words will have the conjunctive-disjunctive pair and the preceding בראשׁית will have a disjunctive to indicate that it is a preceding prosodic unit. Or, in cases of very short phrases, as with ‏וּבְנֵ֖י גֹּ֑מֶר in Gen 10.3, the disjunctive must reflect a principle of at least one disjunctive within an אתנחתא unit. Heady stuff, these principles of the טעמים.

Edited addition: For Gen 1.1 and Exod 13.8, though, the critical point is that the disjunctive accent on the two words in question absolutely does not prohibit my relative analyses.

Below are the screenshots of the two Accordance searches, for those interested in seeing the results themselves. Note that you made need to consult the Accordance Help to find the right key-strokes to enter the accents into the Character field (for these searches, I used the regular, narrow, and wide versions of טפחא in order to cover the bases).

** I forgot to add the reference for Dresher:

Dresher, Bezalel Elan. 1994. The Prosodic Basis of the Tiberian Hebrew System of Accents. Language 70 (1): 1-52.

This issue has recently been raised here by Brian LePort, who is preparing a conference paper proposal on the topic. I couldn’t help commenting on one of the posts; subsequently, he asked me to pull my thoughts together in a more coherent fashion. Ouch — coherence, that’s a tall order.

In a nutshell, I think the potential pitfalls of student (and pre-tenure professors) blogging considerably outweigh the advantages. I agree with Brian’s cons much more than I agree with the pros. 

Yes, there is the rare student blog that I think understands the value of the exercise (I recommend this one as a model—the blogger used posts to work through a PhD reading list, like writing a précis for each article or book and, importantly, avoided sharply critical comments and any personal or private narrative). And yes, there is the rare blogger who makes connections through his blog (for example, I would not have met the interesting Charles Halton if not through his blog). But for each of these, there are ten stories of foot-in-the-mouth disease, thus making the successes the exceptions that prove what I consider the rule: don’t blog until you have tenure!

My position was formed in the forge of real life (happily for me, it was mostly someone else’s failure). First, I learned early on in the blogging phenomenon that I had difficulty coming across well in my comments. I suspect I came across more often than not as a jack-ass. (Wait—I am a jack-ass! I think some ideas are just stupid and don’t mind saying so. Ok, so my example isn’t the best.) Second, I was indirectly involved in an incident a few years ago which strangely mirrors the 19th-century exchange I recently “discovered” (inserted below). I recommend it strongly. Enjoy the brief tragicomedy.

I’m happy to announce the imminent release of a collection of articles that I’ve co-edited with Aaron Schade (BYU-Hawaii). The volume is dedicated to the memory of J. Brian Peckham, who taught NWS epigraphy at U of T for 30 years. Aaron wrote his doctoral thesis under Peckham at U of T and had the privilege of knowing Brian a few more years than I did. But even during the all-too-brief three years I knew him, I came to understand just how encouraging and inspiring this scholar-teacher was — he was warm, welcoming, witty, and more than happy to share his considerable knowledge and wisdom. Indeed, on one our first meetings when I came to U of T, he shared his many class notes with me; after he passed, I learned from his executor that Brian had specified that I was to get first choice of anything in his extensive library. For these and many more reasons, I will also be indebted to J. Brian Peckham.

Although Brian passed away (September 2008) before the contributions to the volume in his honor were finished, the project had already taken shape by the summer of 2008 and I was able to tell him about during our last beer-and-burger lunch together in  August, just weeks before his final hospitalization. Surprised delight is the only way to describe his reaction. While Brian loved Phoenician and it was both the topic of his doctoral thesis and a subject he taught his entire career, it seems to me that he didn’t realize how much he contributed to the field. But, that was Brian — humble and self-effacing.

Eisenbrauns is running a sale of Phoenician right now, including pre-orders for our book. Take a look!

Also, take a look at Peckham’s final work — his history of Phoenicia, which will be published posthumously by Eisenbrauns.

However, in this post I want to briefly step back into the fray of the discussion. For a while it was a quiet scene, other than the periodic discussion on another blog (see the discussion on John Hobbin’s blog) or the requisite bi-yearly flare up on the b-hebrew list (yes, I confess I’m a lurker there). I say “flare up” because usually it ends with the same folks talking past each other followed by a moderator shutting it down (and rightly so).

But this pattern nicely raises the first point I want to make: Why can’t we just agree on definitions? It amazed me when I worked at Eisenbrauns and copy edited the huge two-volume work Morphologies of Africa and Asia that there was almost complete uniformity in the basic definitions for perfective, imperfective, perfect, state, activity, etc. among the linguists who had contributed (see e.g., the non-controversial definitions from WALS), whereas some of the Semitic philologists who contributed used quite idiosyncratic definitions. It is just silly to continue arguing over basic definitions that are widely agreed upon already, because it both wastes time and halts progress. I made just this point in my review of Furuli’s work, which he continues to defend on b-Hebrew by special pleading about the unique character of aspect in Hebrew. If you want to argue that Biblical Hebrew does or does not have perfective aspect, fine; but quit wasting everyone’s time arguing about what “aspect” is!

Second, I had the privilege of chairing the session at SBL this past month in which Jan Joosten gave his paper touting his new monograph, which appeared in October. I say privilege, because I have profited enormously from his work, mostly by being forced to distinguish our two theories, which at times appear to be only a “hair’s breadth” apart (nod to John Wesley, institutional darling where I work). In particular, our 2002/2006 exchange in JANES was immensely helpful for clarifying my thinking, and so I chuckled when he alluded to our exchange towards the beginning of his paper. However, I and the audience can agree that he made a fatal misstep in the “selling” of his theory by claiming that weqatal and yiqtol are mere allomorphs, stated in a rather off-handed manner, as though somehow self-evident. The almost audible gasps made it clear that this is not at all obvious. Why? Because common sense makes it difficult to conclude that two, very frequent grams (i.e., grammatical constructions) are simply interchangeable in most or all of their instances. But more importantly, this nicely raises my second point: there is NO escaping etymology for explanation of the Hebrew verbal system. The silliness of the consciously synchronic approaches is enough to demonstrate that point (not Joosten, but e.g., Diethelm Michel), but further, all the data tell us that weqatal and yiqtol have different origins and therefore we want an EXPLANATION of the forms not simply a statement that they are allomorphs in free variation.

Such loose treatment of the data leads to my third point: the fatal flaw in the flurry of publications from Alexander Andrason (University of Stellenbosch). There is much I could comment on, and probably should considering he’s attempted to push me into the decrepit generation of verb theories prematurely in his Hebrew Studies article (I fear in this case he favors the loss of memory from one generation to another to which Qohelet refers). When I began noticing his works appear, I was quite pleased to see him refining my basic ideas here, filling in gaps there; but increasingly my shortfallings appeared to be his only justifications for publishing his work. More importantly, his theory became more problematic even as his lack of a clear grasp of the Hebrew data became clear. He makes the error made by so many (probably myself at the early stages) of assuming that the meaning of the text is already clear and we need only explain why this or that verb is used for that meaning. This is both naive and unhelpful. In one of his earliest articles he simply draws on various European translations to demonstrate that given grams have a wide range of meaning. Quite unfortunately, and following from these problems, his theory remains at the theoretical level and is virtually useless for the philological task of deciphering the Biblical Hebrew text. He appears to show little interest in his publications in actually determining the specific meanings in the text that arise from the interaction of some general meaning for the gram and the given context (a la Roman Jakobson). All meanings for a gram appear to be equally valid and available in any context, which further complicates rather than enlightens the philological task.

At the end of the day . . . or ten years gone (nod to Led Zeppelin!), we must return to the realization that verb theory is only profitable insofar as it contributes to the philological task. We have a language fragment in an ancient and composite text; we must proceed with care and attentiveness to literary context and background, comparative and historical linguistics, typological and theoretical linguistics, and the intuition of the traditional grammars, holding our conclusions tentatively. But push ahead we must and stop stalling over theory that seems increasingly to offer no real profit.

Now back to semster’s end grading that I’ve conveniently put off by writing this post!

1. Introduction

Along with the familiar triad of tense, aspect, and mood, valency is a defining property of verbs. Although in Hebrew all these properties involve interaction among verbal lexemes, inflection, and syntax, valency is particularly associated with the system of binyanim in contrast to the association of tense, aspect, and mood foremost with the verbal conjugations. Traditionally, valency has been treated under the rubric of either voice or transitivity. However, a valency approach to Biblical Hebrew has two distinct advantages over these traditional categories: firstly, valency analysis is not hampered by the traditional categories of classical grammar; secondly, valency focuses on the nexus between verbs (i.e., lexeme and binyanim) and argument structure (syntax). Because of this particular focus, valency studies can potentially contribute to Biblical Hebrew lexicography and our understanding of the binynaim, as well as to the decipherment of Biblical Hebrew syntax.
In this paper I introduce the concept of valency and contrast it with voice and transitivity (§2). After this introduction, I briefly summarize approaches to valency in Hebrew grammars (§3), explore some of the issues involved in analyzing valency patterns in Biblical Hebrew, including addressing some objections to such a study (§4), and finally, I illustrate with specific examples how my approach to valency advances our understanding of the Biblical Hebrew lexicon and and syntax (§5).

2. Understanding valency 

The term valency derives from the field of chemistry; in linguistic usage the term refers to the number of syntactic elements a verb requires or permits combining with; in short, valency refers to a verb’s syntactic “combining capacity” (Crystal 2008: 507). Although theoretically limitless, the typical range of verbal valency is zero to three constituents. These four patterns—avalent, monovalent, bivalent, and trivalent—are illustrated in (1) by both English and Biblical Hebrew examples. The constituents that define each verb’s valency pattern are underlined and marked by a subscript in each example.

(1) a. Avalent: It is raining.

תַּשְׁלֵג בְּצַלְמוֹן

‘(It) was snowing on Zalmon.’ (Ps 68:15)

b. Monovalent: She slept.

‏לָכֵן שָׂמַח לִבִּי

‘Therefore my heart rejoices.’ (Ps 16:9)

c. Bivalent: He kicked the ball.

‏יְהוָה תְּפִלָּתִי יִקָּח

‘Yhwh will accept my prayer.’ (Ps 6:10)

d. Trivalent: They gave him a drink.

‏וַתַּשְׁקוּ אֶת־הַנְּזִרִים יָיִן

‘You gave wine to the Nazarites.’  (or ‘You made the Nazarites drink wine.’) (Amos 2:12)

These examples are self-explanatory. However, let me note that the avalent pattern illustrated in (1a) is relatively rare, because a well-formed clause typically requires both a subject and a predicate. What defines the examples in (1a) as avalent is that even where they employ a “dummy” subject pronoun, as in the English example and gloss, that pronoun fulfills no thematic or theta role. (This understanding of the “dummy pronoun” importantly distinguishes true subjectless constructions from those with “indefinite” subject referents, such as the impersonal constructions in Biblical Hebrew; cf. Waltke and O’Connor 1990: §4.4.2 and §22.7a). Therefore, the null-subject strategy in Biblical Hebrew should not be interpreted as a valency-reducing feature of the language (cf. Andersen and Forbes 2012: 167); in all cases except the rare avalent pattern illustrated in (1a), clauses that lack an overt subject in Biblical Hebrew are best analyzed as having a null-subject constituent that serves the appropriate thematic role in the clause.

Transitivity is the analysis of the relationship of a verb to its dependent constituents, and as such clearly intersects valency.  However, transitivity is a more narrow concept than valency in two crucial ways. First, transitivity analyzes only “internal arguments”; that is, the verb-phrase–internal constituents, in contrast to valency’s scope of analysis that includes both internal and external arguments (i.e., the subject; see Crystal 2008: 34). Second, transitivity treats only the verb-dependent constituents that are found in traditional grammar, that is, direct and indirect objects; it does not take into account other constituents governed by the verb that might be included in a valency analysis. As such, the transitivity approach of traditional grammar leads to awkward discussions about so-called accusative noun phrases that function as something other than direct object and other “objects” of the verb as mediated by prepositions (e.g., Waltke and O’Connor 1990: §10–11). Given transitivity’s exclusion of the subject and some prepositional constituents in its analysis, it only partially correlates with valency, as illustrated in (2).

(2) a. Avalent verbs are intransitive.

b. Monovalent verbs are intransitive, but intransitive verbs may be any valency.

c. Bivalent verbs may be intransitive or transitive.

d. Transitive verbs are at least bivalent; they cannot be monovalent.

e. Trivalent verbs are often ditransitive, but they may be transitive or, rarely, intransitive.

f. Ditransitive verbs are always trivalent; they cannot be monovalent or bivalent.

More importantly, a valency analysis better clarifies the relatedness between argument structures such as those in (3) than the traditional grammar analysis in terms of transitivity allows: valency theory identifies both the noun phrase in (3a) and the prepositional phrase in (3b) as complements of the verb אחז in each example.

(3) a. Bivalent אחז with noun phrase complement:

יֹּאחֲזוּהוּ פְלִשְׁתִּים

‘The Philistines seized him.’ (Judg 16:21)

b. Bivalent אחז with ב prepositional phrase complement:

‏וָאֹחֵז בְּפִילַגְשִׁי

‘(I) seized my concubine.’ (Judg 20:6)

Voice analyzes the relationship between the syntactic subject and object and the thematic roles of agent and patient as determined by the verb. For example, the transitive verb with active voice in (4a) takes a subject as agent and the object as patient, whereas the corresponding passive verb in (4b) expresses the same underlying sense while switching the patient role to subject and encoding the agent role with a prepositional phrase.

(4) a. The opera singer(Subject & Agent) sang an aria(Object & Patient).

b. An aria(Subject & Patient) was sung by the opera singer(Agent).

Voice is therefore, like transitivity, both a more narrow concept than valency and derives from traditional grammar, in which the Latinate orientation focuses on morphological distinctions of voice. In Biblical Hebrew voice distinctions are expressed in large part by binyanim, and in her study of the binyanim Maya Arad (2005) has observed several correlations among transitivity, voice distinctions, and the binyanim: according to Arad, both Nifal and Hitpael verbs are intransitive, and the Nifal may also frequently be passive; the Pual and Hofalbinyanim are limited to verb-derived verbs, as opposed to root-derived verbs, in that they always encode the passive counterpart of the Piel and Hifil verb of the same root, respectively. However, because valency is broader than either transitivity or voice, these correlations do not help us escape having to determine the valency patterns of these passive and intransitive verbs, despite the fact that they will tend to have lower valency than verbs in the Qal, Piel, and Hifil binyanim.

3. Approaches to valency

Valency gets only the slightest mention in recent Hebrew grammars, whose approach generally still betrays a traditional-grammar orientation to valency phenomenon. For example, Waltke and O’Connor (1990: §10.2a) note that “[g]rammarians sometimes distinguish between adjuncts and complements, the former signifying an optional constituent of a sentence, the latter an obligatory constituent.” However, they proceed to translate these notions into the traditional-grammar categories of “direct-object accusative” and “adverbial accusative.” Van der Merwe, Naudé, and Kroeze (1999: §33) escape the tradition-grammar approach somewhat more successfully than Waltke and O’Connor and embrace the terminology of complement and adjunct in a more thorough-going approach. In addition, they revise the inherited and simplistic understanding of these categories embraced in Waltke and O’Connor by focusing on the semantic factors rather than the syntactic ones. They define complements as constituents that “cannot be omitted without changing the meaning of the clause or without making the clause ungrammatical,” whereas adjuncts “add information to the core of the clause and may be omitted without changing the basic meaning of the clause.” Further, they state in an accompanying footnote that “[t]he complement of a verb may be omitted, but then only when it can be inferred from the context of the sentence.” Unfortunately, measuring meaning change and grammaticality on a closed corpus for an ancient language is no simple task.

Most recently, Andersen and Forbes (2012: 165–168) in an “aside” on valency in their Biblical Hebrew Grammar Visualized reject a valency approach as problematic on three fronts. First, adopting Crystal’s (2008: 508) standard definition of valency as analyzing the number of valents with which a verb combines to create a well-formed sentence, Andersen and Forbes object that the notion of well-formedness is too vague to be analytically useful for Biblical Hebrew. To illustrate, they provide a statistical analysis of the five verbs that most frequently occur with subjects and those that most frequently appear with a direct object to illustrate how inconsistently the valency pattern of these verbs are. Second, they draw attention to the inherent danger of analyzing English translations of the Hebrew data rather than the Hebrew valency patterns themselves insofar as the semantics and accompanying valency patterns do not match between languages. Third, they note that valency analysis has limited applicability because of the dearth of data; specifically the high incidence of low-frequency verb forms does not allow us to draw valid generalizations from the data.

However, the latter two objections are no serious grounds for abandoning a valency analysis of Biblical Hebrew inasmuch as they apply equally to any linguistic study of Biblical Hebrew. For instance, I have drawn attention to precisely the danger of translation confusion with the target language in my study of tense, aspect, and modality in Biblical Hebrew (Cook 2012: 56). And given the closed and uneven data set that constitutes Biblical Hebrew, any linguistic generalizations about the language must be seen as tentative to one degree or another. By contrast, their objection regarding well-formedness is more serious, especially given the lack of native speakers of Biblical Hebrew: methodologically we must assume that all of the Biblical Hebrew data is well-formed until a case is made to the contrary. However, even in valency studies of spoken languages, well-formedness fails as the central criterion for distinguishing complements and adjuncts, and some studies retreat to the use of statistics in making such judgements (e.g., Villavicencio (2002) sets a threshold of 80% occurrence for identifying a type of constituent as a complement rather than an adjunct). I submit that by reassessing the complement-adjunct distinction as I propose below, this difficulty which Andersen and Forbes point out can be obviated to the degree that it is no longer a serious hinderance to a fruitful valency analysis of Biblical Hebrew.

4. Issues in valency analysis

This brief survey suggests two cautions in developing an analytically useful valency approach to Biblical Hebrew: first, we must develop a more sophisticated understanding of complements and adjuncts than the obviously simplistic identity of these two arguments as obligatory and optional, respectively; on the other hand, we need more rigorous guidelines than a simple vague notion of “well-formedness,” as Andersen and Forbes point out. What is needed is an approach that recognizes the instinctually correct idea that complements are more integral to the predication than adjuncts and analyzes this distinction in a nuanced way that involves both syntactic and semantic factors, given that valency involves the intersection of these two domains. In this way valency study can contribute to our understanding of Biblical Hebrew syntax and lexical semantics, and contribute to the philological task of deciphering the Hebrew texts of the Bible.

Consider the English examples in (5): despite the variation of valency and transitivity of the verb give, all three expressions are equally “well-formed,” grammatically speaking.

(5) a. I give and I give, but do I ever receive any thanks? (monovalent/intransitive)

b. When I heard of her passing, I gave flowers in her memory. (bivalent/transitive)

c. I gave flowers to my wife on Valentine’s day. (trivalent/ditransitive)

The simplistic and binary distinction between complement and adjunct is insufficient for analyzing these various argument structures. The two “graded” divisions in (6) have been suggested as alternatives to the traditional binary distinction of complements and adjuncts.

(6) a. Primary complements — Secondary complements — Adjuncts (DeArmond and Hedberg  1998; 2003).

b. (Obligatory) complements — Optional complements — Contextually optional complements — Adjuncts (Herbst 1999).

The intermediate category of secondary complements in (6a) is based on the contrastive results of linguistic tests applied to benefactive, instrumental, and some types of locative prepositional phrases: while do-so and pseudo-cleft tests identify these constituents as complements, the preposition-stranding test identifies them as adjuncts. Unfortunately, the application of linguistic tests of these sort to Biblical Hebrew is difficult given the absence of native speakers and a closed corpus of data.

Herbst’s three-way complement distinction in (6b) is a more promising basis for valency analysis of Biblical Hebrew verbs, not only because it does not rely on linguistic tests, but because the nature of these distinctions is more obvious and measurable from the data. Let me explain Herbst’s graded categories as they apply to Biblical Hebrew, based on the ongoing use of this model in the development of the Accordance Bible software syntax module (see post). Because our concern is with distinguishing complements and adjuncts and due to the infrequency of avalent or subjectless constructions, I will simply ignore the subject-role complements in my analyses.

First, a verb may have a syntactically obligatory complements; that is, the absence of these constituents makes the expression ungrammatical. However, “obligatory” is in parenthesis in reference to this category in (6b), because different complement patterns may be associated with a single verb. Often a distinction in meaning can be discerned among the different patterns, such as illustrated in (7–8) below.

(7) סמך (qal)

a. Bivalent with NP complement ‘support someone/something’:

הֱקִיצוֹתִי כִּי יְהוָה יִסְמְכֵנִי

‘I awake, because Yhwh supports me.’ (Ps 3:6)

b. Trivalent with NP and על-PP complements ‘lay something on someone’.

וְסָמַךְ יָדוֹ עַל רֹאשׁ הָעֹלָה

‘(He) should lay his hand upon the head of the burnt offering.’ (Lev 1:4)

Examples (7a–b) illustrate two distinct meanings for the qal verb סמך, which are associated with the two distinct valency patterns: a bivalent one and a trivalent one. The trivalent pattern appears to be a technical meaning, appearing only in sacrificial contexts with the exception of one occurrence in Amos 5:19.

A different sort of semantics-based variation is illustrated in by the examples in (8): a trivalent pattern with a noun phrase and prepositional complements is associated with the meaning to ‘give’ (or ‘place’), as illustrated by (8a), whereas a trivalent pattern with an noun phrase and complementary infinitive is associated with the meaning ‘allow’, as illustrated by (8b).

(8) נתן (qal)

a. Trivalent with NP and PP complements: ‘give something to someone’

‏‏הָאֵל הַנּוֹתֵן נְקָמוֹת לִי

‘The God who gives vengeance to me.’ (Ps 18:48)

b. Trivalent with NP and INF complements: ‘allow someone something’

‏‏לֹא־יִתְּנֵנִי הָשֵׁב רוּחִי

‘(He) will not allow me to catch my breath.’ (Job 9:18)

Finally, variation among obligatory valency patterns might admit other explanations. For example, the monovalent intransitive pattern for the hifil of נגע ‘to arrive’, illustrated in (9), occurs only in the books of Songs, Qoheleth, and Esther, which may be dialectally diachronically significant.

(9) נגע (hifil)

הַנִּצָּנִים נִרְאוּ בָאָרֶץ עֵת הַזָּמִיר הִגִּיעַ

‘The blossoms have appeared in the land, the time of pruning has arrived.’ (Song 2:12)

Secondly, a complement is “optional,” according to Herbst (1999), if it is implied by the structure of the predicate itself. Consider the English examples in (10): the former examples in each pair imply a “generalized” complement based on the semantics of the verb itself: one normally reads something with words; one normally cooks food. If the meaning departs from these general senses, a complement is required to cancel the implied complement, as in the second pair in each example.

(10) a. She is reading. (implied complement: something with words)

cf. She could always read his face.

b. He is cooking. (implied complement: food)

cf. He is cooking up trouble.

A Biblical Hebrew example that falls into this category is the qal verb שׁיר ‘to sing’: in its monovalent pattern in (11a), the verb implies a generalized complement of  ‘song’ or the like. However, the verb may also exhibit a bivalent pattern, as in (11b), in which what is sung or sung about is specified by a noun phrase complement. An important piece of evidence supporting the claim of an implied complement is the occasional presence of a cognate complement with such verbs in the bivalent pattern, as in example (11c), in which שירה ‘song’ is the cognate complement of שׁיר. In these cases the cognate complement reinforces the generalized complement implied by the verb itself.

(11) שׁיר (qal)

a. Monovalent with implied complement

‏אָשִׁירָה וַאֲזַמְּרָה לַיהוָה

‘(I) will sing and make melody to Yhwh.’ (Ps 27:6)

b. Bivalent with overt complement: e.g., ‘sing something’

וַאֲנִי אָשִׁיר עֻזֶּךָ

‘But I will sing of your strength.’ (Ps 59:17)

c.Bivalent with cognate complement

אָז יָשִׁיר־מֹשֶׁה וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶת־הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת לַיהוָה

‘Then Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to Yhwh.’ (Exod 15:1)

Finally, “contextually optional” complements refer to constituents that are recoverable or identifiable from the discourse context, in contrast to being implied by the verbal semantics alone, as in the previous case. One indication of this category of valency variation is the infrequency with which a complement might be absent. For example, only 3 of 59 occurrences of the hifil of שׁקה ‘to give a drink’ lack a complement referring to the recipient of a drink. In each instance a good case can be made that the complement is elliptical—that is, null but identifiable from the context. The null constituent and its antecedent are in parentheses in the examples in (12). Note also that what is offered to drink is unspecified, being an optional complement, as in the case of שׁיר, just discussed.

(12) a. Deut 11:10

‏‏אֲשֶׁר תִּזְרַע אֶת־זַרְעֲךָ וְהִשְׁקִיתָ בְרַגְלְךָ

‘. . . where (you) sowed your seed and watered (it = your seed) with your foot’

b. Ps 78:15

‏יְבַקַּע צֻרִים בַּמִּדְבָּר וַיַּשְׁקְ כִּתְהֹמוֹת רַבָּה

‘(He) split rocks in the wilderness and gave (them = them v. 14) drink as the great depths’

c. ‏‏Esther 1:7

וְהַשְׁקוֹת בִּכְלֵי זָהָב וְכֵלִים

‘. . . giving (them = all the people v. 5) drinks in gold vessels’

Determining contextually optional complements is complicated by the previous category of optional complements, because a verb might exhibit both types of valency variation with the result that in the case of a contextually optional example the text is not syntactically “fragmentary” as we expect for elliptical structures. Consider the examples of the qal verb אכל ‘to eat’ in (13): as with English eat, אכל may imply a generalized complement of food as in (13a); but in Genesis 3:6, cited in (13b), the verb has an contextually optional (that is, elliptical) complement whose antecedent is מִפִּרְיוֹ.

(13) a.Ruth 3:7

‏וַיֹּאכַל בֹּעַז וַיֵּשְׁתְּ וַיִּיטַב לִבּוֹ

‘Boaz ate and drank and his heart became merry.’

b. Gen 3:6

‏‏וַתִּקַּח מִפִּרְיוֹ וַתֹּאכַל

‘She took some of the fruit and she ate (it = some of the fruit).’

This type variation among an optional and contextually optional complement may appear in a single passage, as in (14).

(14) 1 Kings 19:5–8‏

‏וַיִּשְׁכַּב וַיִּישַׁן תַּחַת רֹתֶם אֶחָד וְהִנֵּה־זֶה מַלְאָךְ נֹגֵעַ בּוֹ וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ קוּם אֱכוֹל׃ ‎6‏ וַיַּבֵּט וְהִנֵּה מְרַאֲשֹׁתָיו עֻגַת רְצָפִים וְצַפַּחַת מָיִם וַיֹּאכַל וַיֵּשְׁתְּ וַיָּשָׁב וַיִּשְׁכָּב׃ ‎7‏ וַיָּשָׁב מַלְאַךְ יְהוָה שֵׁנִית וַיִּגַּע־בּוֹ וַיֹּאמֶר קוּם אֱכֹל כִּי רַב מִמְּךָ הַדָּרֶךְ׃ ‎8‏ וַיָּקָם וַיֹּאכַל וַיִּשְׁתֶּה וַיֵּלֶךְ בְּכֹחַ הָאֲכִילָה הַהִיא אַרְבָּעִים יוֹם וְאַרְבָּעִים לַיְלָה עַד הַר הָאֱלֹהִים חֹרֵב׃

‘He lay down and fell asleep under a broom bush. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Arise and eat.”  6 He looked about; and there, beside his head, was a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water! He ate (it = the cake) and drank (it = the water), and lay down again.  7 The angel of the LORD came a second time and touched him and said, “Arise and eat, or the journey will be too much for you.”  8 He arose and ate (it = the cake) and drank (it = the water); and with the strength from that meal he walked forty days and forty nights as far as the mountain of God at Horeb.’ (NJPS)

In verse 5 the angel awakes Elijah and tells him קוּם אֱכוֹל. Here the imperative אֱכוֹל appears to be monovalent, with an optional complement implied by the predicate itself: ‘Eat (something).’ In the following verse (v. 6), however, Elijah looks near his head and finds a stone-baked cake (עֻגַת רְצָפִים) and a jar of water (וְצַפַּחַת מָיִם), and the text reports וַיֹּאכַל וַיֵּשְׁתְּ. Both these verbs should be treated as bivalent with contextually optional (i.e., elliptical) complements. Thus, we can intelligibly render them: ‘He ate it and drank it’. This command-narrative pattern is repeated in the following two verses (vv. 7–8), where the angel tells Elijah to eat and drink again. Although the bread and water are now known entities in the discourse, the expression in verse 7 is parallel with that of verse 5, suggesting that as in the previous case the repeated command here is likewise monovalent with a generalized optional complement. The fact that the angel does not specifically tell him to eat and to drink lends some weight to this monovalent interpretation. Similarly, for the repeated report in verse 8 that Elijah וַיֹּאכַל וַיִּשְׁתֶּה ‘ate and drank’ we should understand the two verbs as bivalent, their null complements referring to the cake and water that the reader will infer the angel resupplied or were left over from Elijah’s previous meal.

5. Some illustrations

Having explained valency and advocated a specific approach to valency analysis in Biblical Hebrew, it remains to illustrate the value of carrying out such an analysis. The contribution of valency analysis to our understanding of Biblical Hebrew goes in two directions. In the one direction, valency studies can contribute to lexicography by providing a syntactic basis for distinguishing different nuances of meaning as they are demonstrated to align with specific valency patterns. In the other direction, valency analysis can inform philology by providing data to arbitrating between alternative analyses of some clauses in  the text. Let me illustrate each of these with an example.

First, analyzing lexical meaning in terms of valency patterns may undergird distinctions among homonymy in the lexicon in ways that simple semantic analysis cannot. For example, HALOT lists together under the single root עלל I the poel meanings ‘treat severely’ and ‘glean’, which are illustrated by the examples in (15).

(15) עלל I (poel)

a. ‘Treat severely’

‏עֵינִי עוֹלְלָה לְנַפְשִׁי

‘My eye treats me severely.’ (i.e., ‘afflicts me’) (Lam 3:51)

b. ‘Glean’

וְכַרְמְךָ לֹא תְעוֹלֵל

‘And your vineyard (you) do not glean (completely).’ (Lev 19:10)

While one might be able to do some acrobatics to see how these are etymologically semantically related, HALOT’s entry is only marginally helpful in pointing out that these meanings are distinguished by valency pattern: ‘treat severely’ has a ל prepositional phrase complement whereas the meaning to ‘glean’ has an noun phrase complement. The former occurs only in Lamentations, where the passive poal also occurs with the sense of ‘be treated severely’. Based on this semantic alignment with the different valency patterns, it may be best to see these as two separate verbs, as indeed BDB treats them: though it ultimately relates the verbs to the same root as HALOT, BDB identifies the meaning ‘glean’ as a denominative form from the feminine noun עֹלֵלוֹת ‘a gleaning’.

An example in which attention to valency patterns aids philological analysis of the text is provided by the passage in (16).

(16) דרך (qal)

גַּת דָּרַךְ אֲדֹנָי לִבְתוּלַת בַּת־יְהוּדָה

NRSV: The Lord has trodden as in a wine press the virgin daughter Judah.
NJPS: As in a press the Lord has trodden Fair Maiden Judah.
‘The Lord has trodden the wine press for my the virgin daughter Judah.’ (Lam 1:15c)

Both the NRSV and NJPS treat לִבְתוּלַת as the complement of the verb דרך, and גַּת as some sort of adverbial accusative. But דרך does not elsewhere take as its complement a ל prepositional phrase, though it does appear 5 times with על and 10 times with ב prepositional complements both with a locative idea ‘upon’ or ‘on’. The majority of the time, however, it takes an noun phrase complement. Based on this valency pattern, it is best to identify גַּת as the complement and the prepositional phrase לִבְתוּלַת בַּת־יְהוּדָה as an adjunct, as indicated by the third translation option in (16). And indeed, this is how Keil (1989: 8.372–73) takes the text, explaining: “These [i.e., the young men mentioned in 1:15b] celebrate a feast like that of the vintage, at which Jahveh treads the wine-press for the daughter of Judah, because her young men are cut off like clusters of grapes (Jer. vi. 9), and thrown into the wine-press (Joel iv. 13).”

6. Summary and conclusion

The study of verbal valency in Biblical Hebrew is in its infancy. It is crucially focused on the intersection of syntax and semantics, with the result that it can inform our understanding of both syntax and lexical semantics of Biblical Hebrew. The approach I have proposed and illustrated above, and which is being worked out in the Accordance Bible software syntax module, is one that successfully overcomes possible objections to valency analysis of Hebrew and provides a usable approach to the analysis of Biblical Hebrew argument structure.

Works cited

Andersen, Francis I. and A. Dean. Forbes. Biblical Hebrew grammar visualized. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2012.

Arad, Maya. Roots and Patterns: Hebrew Morpho-Syntax. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005.

Cook, John A. Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: the Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012.

Crystal, David. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 6th ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

Dearmond, Richard C. and Nancy Hedberg. On Complements and Adjuncts. Proceedings of the 1998 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistics Association, 1998.

———. More Issues on the Argument Structure of Primary Complements. Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistics Association : 50–61, 2003.

Herbst, Thomas. English Valency Structures: A First Sketch. Erfurt Electronic Studies in English 6, 1999.

Keil, Carl Friedrich and Franz Delitzsch. Commentary on the Old Testament. Translated by James Martin. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1989.

Van Der Merwe, Christo H. J., Jackie A. Naudé, and Jan H. Kroeze. A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999.

Villavicencio, Aline. Learning to Distinguish PP Arguments from Adjuncts. Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Natural Language Learning 20: 1–7, 2002.

Waltke, Bruce K. and M. O’Connor. An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002.

I was flattered and intrigued. I haven’t participated in this group in the past and didn’t quite know what to expect. However, since our Biblical Hebrew textbook is coming out in the early Summer with Baker Academic and I am currently teaching intro BH using the draft textbook, I thought I’d throw in my 2¢, listen carefully, and hopefully learn something I could apply.

Perhaps for those who have attended this group in the past, it was more of the same tune. For me, it was stimulating, encouraging, and energizing. As I listened to the presentations of the other panelists (and listened as I read my own presentation!), it dawned on me that I’d been slipping into old, lazy patterns in the last few weeks of my BH class. That realization was combined with Daniel Street‘s presentation in which he drove home the point that reading proficiency (the widely-agreed goal of biblical language learning) only comes after conversational proficiency. That is, you can’t get to real reading without first learning to communicate by speaking and hearing. (By the way, Daniel has begun his round-up of the relevant sessions at SBL on his blog, here). [Update Dec 7, 2012: Daniel has continued his post-SBL report here.]

The result of the experience was that I returned with a renewed dedication and refreshed energy to create a better communicative classroom environment. So far, it’s been a lot better. I happened to mention the panel to one of my students after class last week and her response was encouraging: “So that’s why you’ve been using more Hebrew in class” (and, I will add, why I put an abrupt stop to their increasing habit of coaxing English glosses out of me if they didn’t immediately get the meaning of our vocabulary icons).

Below is my presentation for the panel. I hope it provokes a productive discussion. (One of the comments after the presentation was a concern that my learning outcomes would not fit that instructor’s context; to be clear, my proposed learning outcomes are about “setting the bar” generally and I acknowledged to the audience that a good and wise teacher will also adapt to his or her contextual needs.)

paper delivered on Nov 17, 2012, with slight modification

Preface

Almost eight years ago I joined the faculty in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. As the professor responsible for Biblical Hebrew language, establishing clear learning outcomes and developing a sequence of courses that reflects these outcomes as goals and allows for their achievement has been an ongoing goal and, admittedly, a challenge. Though I first taught Biblical Hebrew in 1997 and so have been working through pedagogical issues for fifteen years, success in the classroom (according to my own bar, which is fairly high) has been elusive. Every year I modify the syllabus and just about every year John Cook and I have worked on improving our introductory textbook (even creating a wholly new, illustrated, communicative-focused version three years ago). Below are my current thoughts on how we ought to set goals, followed by draft goals for a three-year sequence that I submit for discussion.

A significant part of the challenge in determining learning outcomes that are appropriate at U of T, and perhaps also at your institutions, is the student demographic. The students who sign up for our Biblical Hebrew courses consistently reflect a wide range of backgrounds and interests. In terms of linguistic abilities, some are mono-lingual, while many are natively multi-lingual. The majority no longer speak English as a first language and there is a significant immigrant/international student presence, a few of whom are still learning English even as they are attempting to learn Hebrew.

In terms of educational background, we always have a few Jewish students who studied Hebrew in Israel or Hebrew Day School and so begin the year already knowing the alphabet and a number of basic vocabulary, but little more. These students are thrown in with students who are truly starting from zero, producing a challenging though potentially quite useful and rewarding classroom dynamic. Educational background also figures prominently in terms of how taking Biblical Hebrew fits their program of study. In the typical first-year classroom, less than half are pursuing a specialist, major, or minor in our department or a related area, such as religious studies, Jewish studies, or Classics. The others are there out of personal interest only, and reflect backgrounds as diverse as commerce, engineering, and art.

And this brings us to student motivation for learning Biblical Hebrew, which necessarily affects (or, at least, has for me) determining learning outcomes. Out of a typical ten student sample in our introductory Biblical Hebrew courses, one is taking it simply to satisfy the final language requirement in our specialist (our department require specialists to study two languages). Two students aren’t sure why they chose the course, five students want to “read the Tanak” or “Old Testament,” and three students are preparing for some sort of seminary or graduate education. This profile fits the students I’ve taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, and Toronto.

Moving from undergraduates to graduate education, I have been mostly disappointed by the Hebrew competency, or more accurately, lack thereof, among graduate students that I have taught in the contexts of both a Christian liberal arts college and two public research universities. Rarely has any first-year MA or PhD student I have taught brought in what I consider an acceptable Hebrew competency. In fact, in my last Grad/Undergrad seminar on advanced Hebrew grammar, the two undergraduates who were completing our departmental three-year sequence outperformed almost every graduate student, whether MA or PhD, whether beginning their program or well along in their coursework.

Of course, for many people my description and the issues it raises will serve in turn to prompt all sorts of questions about contexts and purposes for studying Hebrew—the questions that motivated this session. And this is why I agreed to be a part of the panel, so that I could voice my concerns, add my two cents on “setting the bar,” and listen to wiser teachers than me.

My First 2¢: Establishing Learning Outcomes

And so this brings us to my thoughts on “setting the bar” for various levels of, in my case, Biblical Hebrew learning. The basic learning outcomes that I have arrived at for each year are the product of three streams of experiences. The first is my work on two Intro BH textbooks with John Cook, at Asbury Theological Seminary.

The second stream is the year I spent at the end of my doctorate enrolled at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The bulk of my time was spend in ulpan, learning Israeli Hebrew both for research and for enjoyment. What I realized later was that an unexpected pedagogical benefit equaled if not surpassed the two original reasons. Finally, during a year of transition in our department, I was the Israeli Hebrew language coordinator and spent some time investigating curricula and learning outcomes for a three-year sequence of Israeli Hebrew courses.

My interest in and investigation of Israeli Hebrew language curricula introduced me to the wealth of research on language learning and teaching by groups like the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)* as well as documents specific to ancient languages, such as the Standards for Classical Language Learning (1997).** While I have not immersed myself in the research like those who annually participate in this group have, I did glean enough to inform the development of a curriculum with clear, sometimes measurable, learning outcomes.

*http://www.actfl.org. See especially the document Performance Descriptors for Language Learners, 2012 Edition, accessible at http://www.actfl.org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/actfl-performance-descriptors-language-learners.

**Standards for Classical Language Learning. 1997. American Classical League. Oxford, OH: Miami University. http://www.aclclassics.org/uploads/assets/files/Standards_ Classical_Learning.pdf. Last accessed 11/15/2012.

For example, the ACTFL has produced a very helpful document, Performance Descriptors for Language Learners, 2012 Edition (henceforth, Performance Descriptors), which lays out learning outcomes for language performance at three levels, novice, intermediate, and advanced. The document is primarily aimed at modern, spoken languages, but not exclusively so. In fact, they include a paragraph explicitly addressing the application of the descriptors to “classical languages,” in which they both note that this aligns with many of the learning outcomes identified in the Standards for Classical Language Learning and suggest that,

… while reading and understanding the written messages of the ancient world is a key to communication in the study of Latin and classical Greek, the oral use of the language can also be employed to help students avoid reading or translating word-for-word as they must listen in “chunks” (several words holding the meaning or phrases) and respond spontaneously during oral communication. This practice also builds student interest and heightens understanding of and appreciation for the languages and their cultures. (Performance Descriptors for Language Learners 2012:11; emphasis added, RDH)

Building and maintaining student interest in the classroom while increasing linguistic ability has become a primary goal in my search for the right curricular structure and so has informed my development of learning outcomes.

Above all, my teaching and learning experiences led me conclude that successfully engaging a higher percentage of students required a more active approach to the ancient language learning process. Traditional outcomes are typically passive in the sense that they stress only the recognition component of language use and minimize, if not omit, the production component. Such outcomes stress parsing, analysis, lexicon, and place a priority on translation, typically a minimal component of modern language learning environments, in which it used decreasingly, which stands in direct contrast to the increasing use of translation in intermediate and advanced levels of ancient language learning.

Besides the deadening boredom of the traditional curriculum—both for student and teacher!—it only makes pedagogical sense to engage as many of the physical senses as possible, in the recognition that the more parts of the brain the student is required to activate in class, the more likely comprehension and retention will follow.

What follows in the next few minutes, then, is my attempt to use the best of modern language teaching practices for a Biblical Hebrew sequence, while keeping in mind that there are significant practical (though not principled) differences in the ultimate goal of the process.

Another 2¢: Draft Learning Outcomes

The ACTFL’s Performance Descriptors document notes that “The most common program model for language learning in this country continues to be two years of instruction at the secondary level. This model limits students to performance in the Novice range.” While some may argue that language learning at the secondary level differs from the post-secondary level, I suggest that this is not the case. The difference in the learning achievement and rate is generally a factor of the contact hours, sustained study time, and personal interest. I argue that these three ranges of the Performance Descriptors may be legitimately applied to any adult (secondary or post-secondary) learning sequence.

In addition to the three ranges (novice, intermediate, and advanced), the Performance Descriptors describes the learning outcomes across three modes of communication (interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational) For ancient languages such as Biblical Hebrew, I consider the presentational mode to be the least relevant to the ultimate goal of a deeply sympathetic linguistic and communicative interaction with the biblical discourses. Thus, I draw more strongly from the interpersonal and interpretive modes in formulating my learning outcomes for three levels of Hebrew learning.

Novice (1st year) = understands highly practiced words, phrases, and formulaic language; expresses self using variety of words, phrases, simple sentences, and questions that have been highly practiced and memorized; gets meaning of the main idea of highly predictable oral and written discourse, with strong visual support.

Functions: can ask highly predictable and formulaic questions and respond to such questions by listing, naming, identifying, or reformulating; can comprehend meaning through recognition of key words and formulaic phrases that are highly contextualized.

Context/Content: exhibits emerging ability to communicate in highly practiced contexts related to oneself and core texts; comprehends texts with highly predictable, familiar contexts.

Text type: understands and produces highly practiced words, phrases, and sentences; able to ask formulaic or memorized questions; able to reformulate simple discourse example; derives meaning in listening and reading exercises when discourse is supported by visuals or redundancy.

Language control: can comprehend highly practiced and basic texts when supported by visual and contextual clues, redundancy, or restatement, and when the message/text contains familiar structures; relies on vocabulary to derive meaning from discourse; may derive meaning by recognizing familiar structural patterns.

Vocabulary: able to understand and produce a number of high frequency words, highly practiced expressions, and formulaic questions.

Communication strategies: able to—imitate modeled words, phrases, and sentence types; use facial expressions and gestures; ask for repetition; indicate lack of understanding; able to—skim and scan; rely on visual support and background knowledge; predict meaning based on context and/or prior knowledge, experience; recognize roots, prefixes, suffixes.

In more traditional terms:

basic grammar

@600 words

recognition of words (pointed and unpointed)

recognition of narrative patterns (word order, verb types)

production of question-answer about texts, comments about texts

aural recognition of vocabulary and questions about texts

recognition of narrative arc and ability to summarize/reformulate in simple terms

Intermediate (2nd yr) = understands main ideas and some supporting details from a variety of familiar texts; expresses self and awareness of texts using sentences, reformulation, and question-answer pairs.

Functions: can understand, ask, and answer a variety of questions; comprehends mains ideas and identifies supporting details.

Context/Content: exhibits emerging evidence of ability to communicate about occasionally unfamiliar discourse.

Text type: able to understand and produce discrete sentences, strings of sentences, and connected sentences; comprehends paragraph discourse (spoken and written).

Language control: understands straightforward language that contains mostly familiar structures; sufficient control of grammar (vocabulary, structure) and conventions to understand fully and with ease short texts, ranging from low to medium complexity.

Vocabulary: comprehends and uses medium-to-high frequency vocabulary and idiomatic expressions.

Communication strategies: able to—ask questions; ask for clarification; self-correct or restate when not understood; circumlocute; skim and scan; use visual support and background knowledge; predict meaning based on context or prior knowledge, experience; use contextual clues; recognize roots, prefixes, suffixes.

In more traditional terms:

@25 chapters of narrative (e.g., Josh, Judg, 1 Sam, 2 Sam, 1 Kgs, or 2 Kgs)

recognition of narrative agents and events, story arc and critical supporting details

ability to invert/manipulate text and create new texts, in both written and oral exercises

aural recognition of vocabulary, questions about texts, and whole (small) texts

production of answers, from simple to complex, to questions about texts.

Advanced (3rd year) = understands main ideas and supporting details from familiar and new texts, and confidently navigates texts with new or unexpected complications.

Functions: can understand and produce with confidence and relative ease narrations and descriptions in all major time frames (e.g., past, present, future) and modalities (real, irreal); comprehends the main idea and supporting details of narrative texts; exhibits emerging ability to comprehend poetic texts; makes inferences and derives meaning from context and linguistic features.

Context/Content: comprehends texts pertaining to variety of topics and situations.

Text type: comprehends multi-paragraph discourse (spoken and written) and poetry.

Language control: consistent control of medium-to-high frequency structures facilitates comprehension and production; sufficient control of grammar (vocabulary, structure) and conventions to understand fully and with ease more complex texts with connected language and cohesive devices; derives meaning by understanding sequencing, time frames, and chronology.

Vocabulary: comprehends and uses low-to-medium frequency vocabulary and idiomatic expressions.

Communication strategies: able to—request clarification; repeat; restate; rephrase; circumlocute; skim and scan; use visual support and background knowledge; predict meaning based on context or prior knowledge, experience; use contextual clues; use linguistic knowledge; identify organizing principles of a text; create inferences; differentiate main ideas from supporting details in order to verify.

In more traditional terms:

@25 chapters poetry and narrative (e.g., Qoh, select Pss, select Job, minor prophets; 1 Chr, 2 Chr, Ezra-Neh)

composition of prose and poetry; oral delivery; aural recognition of texts

original production of prose and poetry, both planned and extemporaneous, both written and oral

parsing/analysis of grammar (accurate production of vocalized forms, with knowledge of “rules”; accurate production of syntax, with knowledge of patterns)

historical-comparative-typological contextualization of “ancient/biblical” Hebrew

Last 1¢ for the Full Nickel: Concluding Thoughts

I have now outlined what I think are practical, achievable learning outcomes for a three-year sequence in Biblical Hebrew, outcomes grounded in both modern language pedagogy and a recognition that ancient language learning has a slightly different end goal. I want to end with a couple musings, about … “life, the universe, and everything”(Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

First, should learning outcomes differ depending on institutional context? I don’t think so. If the research suggests that we learn languages using certain techniques, they should be applied to undergraduates, seminarians, and graduate students alike. The pace may differ, but the techniques shouldn’t.

Second, language learning outcomes should not be confused with exegetical outcomes. We do little to no exegetical training at the undergraduate level at Toronto, even though we have high language expectations. If students are interested in exegesis and the related activity of finding significance in the textual meaning, we encourage them to pursue further studies in a theological context. Even in theological contexts, I do not think that the language learning and exegetical instruction should be confused. Certainly brief exegetical discussions in the language course may serve to motivate students, but if the language courses become exegesis, the language learning itself will suffer at the hands of discussions in English (or whatever modern language is used).

Third, at the end of the day, everyone’s goal in learning Biblical Hebrew (or Greek) is to read and comprehend the biblical texts. But my interactions with students from over a dozen years of teaching Hebrew tells me that we undershoot both reading and comprehension. Our aim is low, much too low for students to engage these texts in any sympathetic communicative way.

Finally, is too little worse than none? If we aren’t going to teach towards the kind real proficiency and comprehension, I don’t think there is a reason to teach the language. For example, I think a lone year of language instruction is, to be blunt, useless. Any institution and instructor that is serious about achieving advanced performance, and so deep textual comprehension, should work towards mapping out a three-year sequence, at a minimum.

In addition to teaching quite a bit and working on a number of encyclopedia entries, our textbook, a joint Baylor Hebrew Bible Handbook (on Qoheleth), a Baylor volume of his own (on the Biblical Aramaic portions of Ezra and Daniel), John achieved tenure at his institution and also published his book on the Biblical Hebrew verb (see the new link on the left sidebar).

Besides developing a couple new courses, writing a number of encyclopedia articles, working on the joint Baylor volume with John as well as another Baylor volume (on Esther) with a doctoral student in my department, I have two articles coming out in JBL and JSS (both of which took me a number of years to finish off). And I am trying to balance my work on the Accordance Hebrew syntax project with my desire to finish revising what used to be my thesis on the relative clause (I say “used to be” because the amount of newly added material makes it a different work altogether).

So, it has been a busy year for us. Sadly, little of that translated into blogging. But I will make a post based on my SBL presentation on Biblical Hebrew pedagogy in the next day or so and John will post on verbal valency in the next few weeks. For now, below are links to some of the works we’ve published (or finished and are in press) in the last year.

——- 

John A. Cook. 2012. Detecting Development in Biblical Hebrew Using Diachronic Typology. Pp. 83-95 in Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew, ed. Cynthia Miller-Naudé and Ziony Zevit. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. (PDF; BOOK)

John A. Cook. Forthcoming. The Verb in Qoheleth. In Fresh Perspectives on Qohelet, ed. Mark Boda, Tremper Longman, and Cristian Rata. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. (draft PDF)

John A. Cook. Forthcoming. Actionality (Aktionsart), Aspect, and Verb in Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, ed. Geoffrey Khan. Leiden: Brill.

John A. Cook 2012. Hebrew Language. Pp. 307–18 in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, ed. J. Gordon McConville and Mark Boda. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity. (PDF)

Robert D. Holmstedt. 2012. Historical Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew. Pp. 96-124 in Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew, ed. Cynthia Miller-Naudé and Ziony Zevit. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. (PDF; BOOK)

Robert D. Holmstedt. 2012. Review of Annick Payne, Hieroglyphic Luwian: An Introduction with Original Texts; 2nd revised ed. Subsidia et Instrumenta Linguarum Orientis 2; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010. Review of Biblical Literature  [http://www.bookreviews.org]. (PDF)

Robert D. Holmstedt. In Press. The Nexus between Text Criticism and Linguistics: A Case Study from Leviticus. To appear in the Journal of Biblical Literature. (PDF Draft)

Robert D. Holmstedt and Andrew R. Jones. The Pronoun in Tripartite Verbless Clauses in Biblical Hebrew: Resumption for Left-Dislocation or Pronominal Copula? To appear in the Journal of Semitic Studies. (PDF Draft)

Robert D. Holmstedt. 2012. Review of Qumran Cave 1, II: The Isaiah Scrolls. Part 1: Plates and Transcriptions; Part 2: Introductions, Commentary, and Textual Variants. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXXII. Eugene Ulrich and Peter. W. Flint, with a contribution by Martin G. Abegg, Jr. 2010. Oxford: Clarendon. To appear in The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. (UPDATE: now published here)

In a previous post, I (RDH) partially based my analysis of the syntax of Gen 1.1 within the larger structure of Gen 1.1-3 on the existence of examples where a wayyiqtol clause has a Topic-fronted Prepositional Phrase that is located before the wayyiqtol, such as Gen 22.4 (1).

(1) Gen 22:4 בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁלִישִׁ֗י וַיִּשָּׂ֨א אַבְרָהָ֧ם אֶת־עֵינָ֛יו וַיַּ֥רְא אֶת־הַמָּק֖וֹם מֵרָחֹֽק׃
‘On the third day, Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from afar.’

In this post, we follow that description of Gen 1.1-3 with additional supporting data and analysis.

In Gen 22.4, there is no other verb than וישׂא for the initial PP ביום השׁלישׁי to be related to. Thus, unless one proposes that the PP is a complement within a null Subject, null copula clause, e.g., ‘(It) (was) on the third day’, the only alternative (I can think of) is to take the PP as an adjunct of וישׂא that has been fronted as a (scene-setting) Topic. (On the nature of Topic-fronting, see the discussion in Holmstedt 2009, here.)

If we are correct in the fronting analysis of the PP, it leaves the ו on וישׂא in an interesting place—just sitting there between the fronted adjunct and the verb. Some might be tempted to argue that this supports seeing the waw as an integral part of the complex wayyiqtol verb. Such a view of the wayyiqtol has been taken in Hebrew studies.

But we do not find this option compelling. First, all things being equal, it is simpler to take the form at face value: the waw is a waw and the yiqtol is a yiqtol (on the gemination, see Holmstedt 2009:125, n. 32 and sources cited there). Second, we point to other places where the waw sits at phrase edges, e.g., in apposition (2), at the beginning of parentheses (3), after a fronted phrase (4) and between left-dislocated constituents and the clause proper (5).

(2) 1 Sam 17.40 וַיִּקַּח מַקְלוֹ בְּיָדוֹ וַיִּבְחַר־לוֹ חֲמִשָּׁה חַלֻּקֵי־אֲבָנִים מִן־הַנַּחַל וַיָּשֶׂם אֹתָם בִּכְלִי הָרֹעִים אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ וּבַיַּלְקוּט
‘And he took his staff in his hand and he chose for himself five smooth stones from the ravine and he put them in the shepherds’ bag he had, that is, in the pouch’ (see Waltke-O’Connor §39.2.1b #6)

(3) Gen 14.13 ‏וְהוּא שֹׁכֵן בְּאֵלֹנֵי מַמְרֵא הָאֱמֹרִי אֲחִי אֶשְׁכֹּל וַאֲחִי עָנֵר וְהֵם בַּעֲלֵי בְרִית־אַבְרָם
‘he [=Abram] was dwelling at the Oaks of Mamre, the Amorite, brother of ‘Eshkol and brother of ‘Aner (they were covenanters of Abram’s)’

(4) 2 Kgs 16.14 וְאֵת הַמִּזְבַּח הַנְּחֹשֶׁת אֲשֶׁר לִפְנֵי יְהוָה וַיַּקְרֵב מֵאֵת פְּנֵי הַבַּיִת
‘And the bronze altar that was before Yhwh he removed from the front of the Temple … ‘

(5) Gen 17.14  וְעָרֵל זָכָר אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יִמּוֹל אֶת־בְּשַׂר עָרְלָתוֹ וְנִכְרְתָה הַנֶּפֶשׁ הַהִוא מֵעַמֶּיהָ
‘And as for the uncircumcised male whose foreskin is not circumcised—that person shall be cut off from his people’ (see Joüon-Muraoka §176g-l)

These examples point to a broader and deeper generalization than the wayyiqtol=verb option provides. The waw in each of the examples in (2)-(5) does not coordinate two equal constituents, as prototypical coordination does, but marks the “edge” between two constituents. In no case is it syntactically necessary, which is why we suggest it is a pragmatic function of the waw used to facilitate syntactic processing. As such, it falls into a similar (although not identical) use of the waw that C. L. Miller discusses in her 1999 article on the use of waw at the beginning of direct speech.

Let us now turn back to the structure of Gen 1.1-3, specifically the role of the initial PP בראשׁית in the larger structure (vv. 1-3) to which it belongs. I partially rested my analysis on the PP-ויהי structure I mentioned at the outset of this post. Such Topic-fronted PPs serve to situate the following action or event in a specific temporal or locative context. This structure often follows a preceding ויהי that is syntactically unconnected. The first ויהי is the use of ויהי as a discourse marker, often used to signal scene transitions.

Certainly, ויהי can function as a true copular verb, and it also functions (although rarely) as the existential verb. But the ויהי (specifically the 3ms form) may also stand separately and function as a discourse-marker of the temporal location of the following information (this is also true for the irreal-future והיה, but that is for another post). Generally the discourse usage of ויהי will be obvious from the lack of any clear subject or complement.

To find out just how many of these discourse ויהי exist in Genesis, we did a simple search in our syntax module within Accordance. There were 59 hits in Genesis.

Discourse ויהי (search and results)

In the 59 examples, what follows the discourse ויהי is a PP (either with NP complement or Infinitival Phrase complement) [53x], a adjunct כי clause [5x], or one case of an independent clause [15.17]. In all but 15.17, the fronted phrase/clause is an adjunct within a following clause, most of which are wayyiqtol clauses (i.e., PP-wayyiqtol).

To find out what percentage these examples constitute within the book of Genesis, we did a simple morphological search for 3ms “wawConsecutive” (in Accordance parlance) and there were 122 hits. This means that the discourse ויהי accounts for 48.4% of the overall ויהי use in Genesis.

Finally, we searched for all the cases where an adjunct phrase is Topic-fronted and the following verb is a wayyiqtol (actually, we widened the search to look for all waw+verb combinations).

PP-Waw-Verb (search and results)

The results are interesting. They highlight that not only does a fronted PP adjunct occur with wayyiqtol verbs, but also with waw+irrealis qatal (3.5). They also highlighted a few of the cases where והיה (irrealis qatal היה) is used as a discourse marker (9.14, 27.40, 30.41, 47.23). More important for understanding Gen 1.1 are the cases where there is no initial discourse ויהי before the fronted PP (besides 1.1-3, see 3.5, 22.4, 27.34, 28.6, and 37.18).

In conclusion, the data support that validity of the analysis of Gen 1.1-3 (given in the previous post by RDH) with respect to this pattern: Topic-fronted PP (1.1) before a wayyiqtol (1.3). The examples that are particularly strong are those without an initial ויהי. Those examples, together with the discourse ויהי proposal, encourage the identification of many more, i.e., all those that follow a discourse ויהי.

Reference:

* Holmstedt, Robert D. 2009. Word Order and Information Structure in Ruth and Jonah: A Generative-Typological Analysis. Journal of Semitic Studies 54 (1):111-39.

* Miller, Cynthia L. 1999. The Pragmatics of Waw as a Discourse Marker in Biblical Hebrew Dialogue. Zeitschrift für Althebraistik 12 (2):165-91.

Introduction 

Genesis 1.1 is one of the most discussed verses in the Hebrew Bible. It is the first verse of the first book, initiates the Hebrews’ grand cosmology, and … contains an apparent grammatical crux. Phooey! You would think that one could get further than one word into the Hebrew Bible without a grammatical problem.

In fact, there is no problem, only a long-term misunderstanding of Hebrew grammar. In a 2008 article appearing in Vetus Testamentum (which revised a sub-section taken from my 2002 thesis), I argued for an analysis of the first verse that is grounded both in my long-term research on the Hebrew relative clause and comparative Semitic grammar. You can find the article linked here.

But recently I was criticized (on a blog), for failing to explain how my analysis of 1.1 fit into an interpretation of 1.1-3. So, although my argument for Gen 1.1 stands ably on its own, I will take the opportunity presented by the recent criticism to summarize my argument for 1.1 and provide my analysis of vv. 1-3.

The Nature of בראשׁית in Gen 1.1

In a nutshell, the interpretation and translation of the first complex word, בְּרֵאשִׁית, in the Masoretic text of the Leningrad Codex as an absolute temporal prepositional phrase, “in the beginning, …” is grammatically indefensible. Period. End of story.

If one wants to ignore the Masoretic vocalization and read the word with an articular vowel with the preposition, i.e., *בָּרֵאשִׁית, “in THE beginning,” as the Samaritan Pentateuch appears to do, fine. But one must not only recognize that such a choice is a departure from the Masoretic text, but also fails to explain the Greek Ἐν ἀρχῇ, which also lack the definite article.

What is the grammatically justified analysis? The noun ראשׁית is bound to an unmarked relative clause, “beginning-of (that/when) God created …”. This construction, which is found in Ge’ez, Old South Arabian, and Akkadian, must be as old as Semitic itself. In other words, the noun-bound-to-clause structure of ראשׁית ברא in Gen 1.1. finds a clear parallel in the Akkadian pattern di:n idi:nu “judgment (that) he judged/rendered” (Lipinski 2001:533-34; also see Deutscher 2001, 2002 for insightful linguistic discussion of origins of the Old Akkadian relative clause).

Here I should also mention the excellent study, Baasten 2007. Baasten covers much the same ground as I do in my 2008 VT article and it is unfortunate that our library did not receive the book until well after my article came out. I recommend reading Baasten’s study alongside mine.

The biggest difference between Baasten’s study, as well as all previous studies of the noun-bound-to-clause construction in Semitic, and my argument (in my thesis and in the 2008 VT article) concerns the semantics of this unmarked relative clause. I argue that using a bound form of the noun serving as the head of the relative clause is one strategy used to mark the relative clause as restrictive. The other strategy used to mark a Hebrew relative as restrictive is to omit the relative word, i.e., an unmarked or asyndetic relative clause. Interestingly, both strategies are used in בראשׁית ברא! That is, Gen 1.1 is doubly-marked as a restrictive relative clause, meaning that this particular ראשׁית cannot be identified without the information given within the relative. It is the particular ראשׁית during which God created the heavens and the earth. It is not an absolute ראשׁית, “THE beginning”, but just one specific ראשׁית that is being referenced in Gen 1.1.

That is the essence of my argument for Gen 1.1.

The Addition of the Preposition ב to בראשׂית

The difference between the basic di:n idi:nu syntax of ראשׁית ברא … and how Gen 1.1. really starts is the addition of the clitic preposition ב. The preposition takes ראשׁית, with its attached relative clause, as its own complement. The lack of the articular vocalization in the Masoretic tradition leaves open the question whether the ראשׁית should be translated as definite in English. Since ראשׁית is “in construct,” it depends on the definiteness of its clitic host to signal its own definiteness. The problem, of course, is that a clause is never marked as definite. So, we are left with some ambiguity: is בראשׁית ברא “in a beginning period that …” or “in the beginning period that …”? I suggest that the referential nature of the nominalized clause grounds the ראשׁית sufficiently to make it definite (specific, identifiable) and so using “the” in English, as long as no comma is inserted after “beginning,” is the legitimate translation.

As a whole, the addition of the ב preposition indicates that the noun ראשׁית and its relative clause have been assigned a role within a larger clause. Fronting a prepositional phrase as a scene-setting Topic before the main verb is a very common narrative strategy in Hebrew. Once need only look for examples like Gen 22.4, בַּיּוֹם הַשְׁלִישִׁי וַיִּשָּׂא אַבְרָהָם … “on the third day Abraham lifted …”. Moreover, once it is recognized that the vast majority a high percentage** of occurrences of וַיְהִי in BH narrative are discourse markers and not the main verb for a following prepositional phrase, the use of Topic PPs fronted before a wayyiqtol (past narrative) verb becomes ubiquitous at scene transitions in narrative. In other words, in Gen 4.3, וַיְהִי מִקֵּץ יָמִים וַיָּבֵא קַיִן…, the initial ויהי is a discourse marker and the PP מקץ ימים is a Topic-fronted temporal modifier for the verb ויבא, “At the end of (so many) days, Cain brought …”.

**According to the study in this new post, the discourse ויהי account for 48.4% of the total ויהי in the book of Genesis.

The Status of Verse 2

The Topic-fronted PP, main wayyiqtol verb pattern of Gen 1.1. is very well-attested in biblical narrative. So what role does verse 2 play, with its shift to a Subject-Verb (qatal/perfective) syntax? The simple answer is that it is a compound parenthesis, consisting of 3 clauses.

Parentheses are constituents (phrases, clauses, or even compound clauses, like Gen 1.2) that interrupt the flow of an ‘argument’, whether the argument is at its core chronological (i.e., a narrative) or logical (i.e., an exposition, as in, e.g., many psalms).

The easiest parenthetical constituents to identify are those that are syntactic interruptions, as in Esth 9.24, וְהִפִּיל פּוּר הוּא הַגּוֹרָל לְהֻמָּם וּלְאַבְּדָם “and one cast a ‘pur’ (it is the lot) to disturb them and destroy them.” In Esth 9.24, the null copula clause הוא הגורל “it is the lot” interrupts the clause within which it sits, separating the core of the main predicate from the adjunct infinitive clauses. Note, though, that parentheses cannot simply be thrown anywhere in its host clause. Rather, they must be placed at word or phrase edges. In other words, one never finds a parenthesis that intervenes between a preposition and its complement, since those two items either form a word (i.e., when the preposition is ב, כ, or ל) or a phrase in which one or both parts cannot stand on their own (i.e., even the preposition is orthographically separate, it still ‘leans’, i.e,. is cliticized, on its complement host). This also applies to collocations of verbs and complements. So, in the case of Esth 9.24, the parenthesis is inserted between the verbal complement and the verbal adjunct. We would not find a parenthesis intervening between the verb and its complement, because those two items combine to form a semantic unit.

A test for parenthesis is to ask these questions:

1. Does the clause in question add an event on par with the preceding event? If so, it is not likely a parenthesis.

2. Does the clause in question add information about a specific constituent in the preceding clause and yet does not appear to be a relative clause? Also, does the clause in question overlap with the preceding clause in almost all the constituents but adds, say, one new constituent? If either (or both) is true, the clause is likely a parenthesis. (Note that this condition distinguishes parenthesis from what are often taken as circumstantial clauses, where the overlap is minimal and the clause does not primarily modify a single constituent, but often an entire event or situation).

3. Does the structure of the clause in question differ from the structure of the clause on either side of it and do those two clauses share a similar structure? If so, and if it does not contribute an action or even on par with the preceding and following clauses (per #1), it may be a parenthesis.

With this description of and criteria for identifying parentheses in hand, we can now turn back to Gen 1.2. Syntactically, the compound clause in v. 2 sits between a Topic-fronted adjunct clause, בראשׁית…, and the main verb, ויאמר in v. 3. So far, so good—it sits at an appropriate phrase edge. Does it add an event on par with the preceding event (#1)? In the case of Gen 1.1-3, this criteria is hardly applicable, since the preceding event is also subordinate. But criteria #2 fits perfectly, since Gen 1.2 picks up with הארץ, which was first presented in v. 1, but then adds something more. So there is overlap, but also additional information. And finally, #3 seals the identification: there is clear structural difference in syntax between, on the one hand, v. 2, with its Subject-Verb order and, on the other hand, the noun-bound-to-clause in v. 1 and the wayyiqtol clause in v. 3. Now, v. 1 and v. 3 don’t share the same structure, but that’s because v. 1 a syntactic part of v. 3. Nonetheless, the shift we see in v. 2 is paralleled many times with other parentheses in the Hebrew Bible.

Conclusion

The overall analysis of Gen 1.1-3 given above has a long history in biblical scholarship. It is also the analysis adopted in Baasten 2007, although with the tie-in to relative clause restrictivenes. Here is a basic English translation that would serve as a starting point for working out one that reflects whatever translation theory one adopts:

“In the beginning period that God created the heavens and earth (the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the wind of God was hovering over the surface of the waters), God said, ‘Let light be!’”

Happily, within biblical scholarship, the analysis I have promoted above is being adopted by my peers (e.g., Mark Smith in his Priestly Vision of Genesis 1, and Ellen van Wolde, in her 2009 JSOT article). [John Walton's book was submitted in 2006, too early to have read either Baasten's or my articles.]

More troubling is the attitude exhibited in the critical blog I mentioned at the outset. The owner [RDH: the author requests attribution], Peter Kirk (gentlewisdom.org) presents himself as a representative of was formerly a professional Bible translator but is no longer; he wrote this:

But the traditional understanding of 1:1 has a history going back over 2000 years to LXX. To overturn such a tradition you will always need overwhelming evidence. And neither I nor the majority of professional Bible translators have seen that overwhelming evidence. So for the moment you need to accept that your position is considered one of the possible alternatives …

Beside the mistaken view of the LXX on Gen 1.1 (it does not reflect an article, just like the Masoretic vocalization; see above), what is disturbing about this comment is that professional Bible translators, to my knowledge, rarely have PhDs in biblical studies and are thus not experts in Hebrew grammar or Hebrew exegesis. [RDH: Peter Kirk has clarified what he referred to by professional translators—those who made English translations like the NIV11; this was not how I was taking him; see my comment below.] And yet, this one has clearly set himself up as a greater expert on the grammar, textual tradition, and literary features of Gen 1.1 than me, Martin Baasten, Mark Smith, Ellen van Wolde, and over a century of Semitists who understood the basic grammatical noun-bound-to-clause structure of Gen 1.1.

Disturbing, indeed, and not a good sign for the quality of the interpretation behind Bible translations done by “professionals” with this relationship to Hebrew grammarians.

[RDH: clarification in the comment below. I do not mean to disparage all professional translators, of both types, as I specify in my comment; rather, their respective skill sets indicate that one would think both would look to developments in Hebrew grammatical analysis. Hmm...digging self deeper hole. Oh well.]

References

* Baasten, Martin F. J. 2007. First Things First: The Syntax of Gen 1:1-3 Revisited. Pp. 169-88 in Studies in Hebrew Literature and Jewish Culture Presented to Albert Van Der Heide on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Martin F. J. Baasten, and Reinier Munk. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer.

* Deutscher, Guy. 2001. The Rise and Fall of a Rogue Relative Construction. Studies in Language 25 (3):405-22.

* Deutscher, Guy. 2002. The Akkadian Relative Clauses in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 92:86-105.

* Lipiński, Edward. 2001. Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar. 2nd ed. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 80. Leuven: Peeters Publishers.

* Smith, Mark. S. 2010. The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress.

* Wolde, Ellen J. van. 2009. Why the Verb ברא Does Not Mean ‘to Create’ in Genesis 1.1-2.4a. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 34 (1):3-23.