Update

It has been just over a year since our last post. Though we have not blogged, we have been busy. Below I highlight some of the things we’ve done. Links to a couple new articles are posted at the bottom.

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.

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Genesis 1.1 and Topic-fronting before a Wayyiqtol

Robert Holmstedt and John Cook

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.

Basic Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Verbal Clause, Part 6

The end is here—the end of this series, that is. I’m no end-of-days prophet, just a Hebrew linguist. (For the other parts of the series, see: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5.)

This is the last post in my 6-part series on basic word order in Biblical Hebrew. My posts have focused on a good linguistic methodology for determining basic word order and the data have been taken only from the book of Genesis. My posts (and the article that they have come from) are simply the beginning. This sort of analysis should be applied to every biblical book (I’m getting there!).

Although at the end of the last post I indicated I would provide ‘my story’ of how to account of the word order variation in Hebrew, typologically and diachronically, I decided that adding this component did not fit the methodological focus of the series. I will add a future post that summarizes my own views on Hebrew word order. Indeed, since I’m giving a paper in the Fall in Germany on this issue, I’ll probably want to use this blog as a sounding board.

As for this series, I welcome any methodological challenges, whether you see holes in my argument or have an alternative model drawn from general linguistics. Comment about it. Post it on your blog and let me know. There has never been (as far I can see) an extended, linguistically informed discussion of word order issues in ancient Hebrew and it’s high time we begin!

Basic Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Verbal Clause, Part 5

In this series (see post #1, #2, #3, #4), I have argued that the study of Biblical Hebrew word order has lacked methodological rigor. In this, the penultimate post, I introduce the last criterion by which the word order data must be filtered.

I have been a bit slower putting up this post since I wanted to check and re-check my data, questioning my judgments as I went in order to produce the best possible results. My eyeballs now hurt more than ever. But, I still hope to finish off the last section by the end of the weekend. From my two or so readers, I covet input.

Basic Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Verbal Clause, Part 3

The third post in a series on Biblical Hebrew Word Order, introduced here.

In the last post I introduced and discussed the criterion of frequency—the most commonly applied test for basic word order. While there is simply no way to determine basic word order apart from this criterion, I suggested that it must be carefully applied. In particular, I argue that the raw numbers must be further filtered by other criteria, such as distribution, which I will discuss in this post.

Basic Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Verbal Clause, Part 1

I have recently finished working through Dr. Adina Moshavi’s 2010 monograph, Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Finite Clause; see here for a table of contents. Below are my thoughts on her book—not a full review but rather an engagement with it. This post will constitute the first part of a 3-part series on Hebrew word order, each of which represents “blogified” components of a article I am writing. Hebrew word order has been an ongoing area of interest for me as long as it has for Moshavi (her book is a revision of her 2000 Yeshiva University PhD thesis).

I take issue with specific, critical parts of Moshavi’s argument. In the three posts of this series I will not interact with her book chapter-by-chapter, section-by-section, and example-by-example, which would be both tedious and a tacit surrender of how the study of word order variation should proceed. (And I don’t like tedium any more than I care to let others establish the parameters and direction of a debate I’m in, and in this case, a debate I overtly joined a decade ago). Instead, I will address Moshavi’s interaction with my previous work on word order in this post (post #1); then in post #2 I will detail what I consider sound methodology and describe what I take to be a balanced typological approach to the issue of basic word order; finally, in post #3 I will build on the previous posts and present an analysis of the data in Genesis, a revision of the analysis I carried out in my 2002 thesis.

It may be helpful to state up front at the beginning that none of these three posts will address the full scope of word order diversity and, in particular, fronting in the biblical texts. Although I am engaged in a long-term project to address this, I will simply say here that there is much in the preceding works on the topic (e.g., Heimerdinger 1999, Shimasaki 2002, Lunn 2006, and Moshavi 2010) with which I agree. While I occasionally gainsay their analyses of specific verses (see, for examples, my reviews of Shimasaki and Lunn), and there are slightly different approaches to defining the term Topic and Focus, etc., there remains some general agreement on the reason for and function of fronted constituents.

Now, to Dr. Moshavi’s book:

Verbs in Habakkuk 3

The theophanic vision report in Habakkuk 3* contains variations among verb forms that seem to defy explanation. For some scholars the solution is simply to ignore the variation. For example, note the treatment of the verb tense-aspect-mood (TAM) in some major English versions/ translations of the vision report of 3:3–15 (comprising 32 verb forms in all): NRSV, NIV, and NKJV translate all the verbs with past forms; while the REB, NAB and JB use mostly present verbs; and the NASB and NLT both show a split between present verbs in verses 3–7 as past verbs in verses 8–15. Recently de Regt (2008: 92) argued for a future temporal reference for the verbs vision based on treating the Perfects as “prophetic perfects.”

Pro-drop in Hebrew: a summary

— this is a draft encyclopedia entry —

Pro-drop is an abbreviation of “pronoun dropping.” It describes a feature of some languages that do not require an overt argument, especially a subject, to be present in a clause. That is, whereas English is not a pro-drop language and thus requires a subject noun or pronoun in a finite verbal clause like He has spoken, in Italian the overt subject may be “dropped,” Ha parlato ‘(He) has spoken’.