Advances in Biblical Hebrew Linguistics

In recent decades, the study of Biblical Hebrew has profited enormously from the application of methodologies derived from general linguistics. During the 16th World Congress of Jewish Studies, Adina Moshavi and Tania Notarius organized sessions devoted to exploring new developments in Biblical Hebrew linguistics, bringing together many of the world’s experts in the field. The papers in this volume are based on research presented at those sessions, along with additional articles specifically written for this volume. The essays included here address topics in philology, language contact, text-linguistics and linguistic pragmatics, syntax, and applied linguistics. The collection showcases Biblical Hebrew linguistics as a dynamic and innovative endeavor that is making important contributions to the study of the Bible, Hebrew language, and modern linguistics.

“In most edited volumes, one or two essays stand out. I found Miller-Naudé and Naudé as well as Doron and Dubnov extremely helpful, and I will return to them regularly for reference; these two articles alone would be worth the price of the volume. What sets this book apart, however, is that there are at least half a dozen other valuable articles, which testifies to the overall quality of a volume that deserves to be on every Hebrew scholar’s shelf.”—Joshua Harper, Journal of Language, Culture, and Religion

Part I: Linguistics and Philology

Linguistic Change through the Prism of Textual Transmission: The Case of Exod 12:9

Noam Mizrahi

All Is Not Lost: Linguistic Periodization in the Face of Textual and Literary Pluriformity

Aaron Hornkohl

Part II: Historical Linguistics and Language Contact

Aramaic Influence and Inner Diachronic Development in Hebrew Inscriptions of the Iron Age

Yigal Bloch

The Linguistics of Writings Systems and the Gap in the Hebrew Scribal Tradition

William Schniedewind

The Second-Person Non-Negated Jussive in Biblical Hebrew and Ancient Northwest Semitic

Tania Notarius

Part III: Text-Linguistics and Linguistic Pragmatics

Participant Tracking, Positioning and the Pragmatics of Biblical Narrative

Frank H. Polak

Nominal and Verb-Second Clauses Not Introduced by waw: A Text-Linguistic Classification

Gregor Geiger

Verticality in Biblical Hebrew Parallelism

David Toshio Tsumura

The Infinitive Absolute and Topicalization of Events in Biblical Hebrew

Galia Hatav

Part IV: Syntactic Studies

Clause Combining in the Song of Moses (Deut. 32:1–43): An Example of Archaic Biblical Hebrew Syntax

Bo Isaksson

The Syntactic Pattern: qtol —> weyiqtol and the Expression of Indirect Command in Biblical Hebrew

Lina Petersson

The Scope of Negation Inside and Outside of the Biblical Hebrew Prepositional Phrase

Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé and Jacobus A. Naudé

The Locative Alternation in Biblical (and Modern) Hebrew

Edit Doron & Keren Dubnov

Part V: Applied Linguistics

Corpus-driven Valence: Give and the Meaning of natan (ntn) in Genesis

Nicolai Winther-Nielsen