Biblical Hebrew הלוא זה\זאת\אלה and Medial Deixis Demonstratives

2021

This paper solves the longstanding puzzle of what speakers of ancient Hebrew meant when employing the pronouns אָנֹכִי versus אֲנִי to refer to themselves. After noting the distribution of these two forms in cognate and nearby languages, we consider the basic communicative needs between a speaker and an audience. This leads to the prediction that the long-form pronoun signals that the speaker’s presence in the situation under discussion is somehow at issue. In contrast, the short form treats the speaker’s situatedness within the discourse as a given. We validate this prediction via various tests. The consistency of findings across a wide range of speakers and books confirms that the distinction between the two pronoun forms is meaningful and a feature of the language as a whole. We conclude that our hypothesis fits the biblical data better, and yields a more coherent and informative biblical text, than explanations proposed by Driver, Cassuto, Rosén, and Revell.

Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, 2013

2013

Maarav, 2022

Rabbinic Hebrew attests to several demonstrative forms with the prefix hallā-: singular הלה hallā and הלז hallāz and plural הללו hallālū. Similar or identical forms are found in the Bar-Kosiba letters from the early second century CE. No comprehensive study of these forms and their function in Rabbinic Hebrew has previously been conducted. Short comments published in the past only touched on hallā and hallālū arguing that the plural form hallālū is an innovation of Amoraic Hebrew unconnected to singular hallā found in Tannaitic Hebrew. The form hallāz in Rabbinic Hebrew has not been discussed. The present article re-examines all these forms both morpholonogically and morphosyntactically, in Tannaitic- and Amoraic Hebrew, comparing them with the forms in Bar-Kosiba Hebrew and reconstructs their development. In contrast with the earlier view, the present article finds that all these hallā- demonstrative forms stem from a single demonstrative paradigm with a relatively distal deictic value that was going out of use in Hebrew in the first centuries CE.

Unbeknownst to me while writing my intermediate grammar, the scholar Benjamin D. Suchard finished a dissertation at Leiden University (in September 2016) titled " The Development of the Biblical Hebrew Vowels. " Unfortunately, I only became aware of the dissertation after my manuscript was sent to the printer. Below, I have compiled a series of comments referring to Suchard's dissertation, oriented to the relevant place in my book.

Vetus Testamentum , 2020

This paper examines the widespread classification of ʾt before the nominative as a trademark of Late Biblical Hebrew. The paper begins by defining the nature and scope of this syntactic usage and reviewing its possible explanations. Next, a full list of the relevant examples is presented and alleged post-biblical cognates are examined. This data leads to the conclusion that contrary to the common scholarly sentiment, ʾt nominativi cannot be considered a late feature within Biblical Hebrew. The evidence from Mishnaic Hebrew that was erroneously associated with ʾt nominativi enables, however, the identification of a hitherto unknown late biblical structure, namely, the demonstrative ʾt ʾšr. Biblical occurrences of this usage are recognizable in Jeremiah, Zechariah, and Qohelet. The paper concludes that while ʾt nominativi is by no means a late usage, the demonstrative ʾt ʾšr may be classified as late with more certainty. This conclusion calls for a re-examination of the syntactic profile of LBH as drawn in the influential works of the field, chiefly those by Kropat and Polzin.

In this paper, applying the cross-linguistic criterion of formal homogeneity, I represent the morphological properties of the imperative-hortative paradigm (volitive modals) in classical Biblical Hebrew: each personal form is marked individually; the 1st person hortative (traditionally called cohortative) has two freely distributed spelling variants, with and without the ending -ɔ̄; the 2nd person (imperative) has two contrasted forms—the basic one and one marked by the ending -ɔ̄; the 3rd person (jussive) has just one allomorph. The imperative—hortative forms are not available in syntactic subordination, but they are used in different types of dependent clauses introduced by the conjunction w- “and”. One of the major hallmarks of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system is the influence of other paradigms—w-perfect, imperfect, and infinitive absolute—on the imperative-hortative paradigm. The linguistic diversity in the Biblical Hebrew corpus points to other types of the imperative-hortative paradigm that are explained in terms of the linguistic chronology—the archaic type and the late type of the imperative-hortative paradigm in Biblical Hebrew. In the conclusion, I will point to the circularity in the diachronic development of the volitive forms in Biblical Hebrew and to the correlation of the diachronic development with the cross-linguistic typology.

2017

This study provides an analysis of copular and existential sentences in Biblical Hebrew (BH). Biblical Hebrew uses three constructions for copular predication. One construction utilises a finite form of the BH copula hyh. The second constructioncalled the verbless (or nominal) clausejuxtaposes subject and predicate without any verbal form. A third construction is a verbless clause which contains a pronominal element (called PRON) and is found in very limited environments.

Doing research on the Biblical Hebrew verb system: Some problems of method 1 by Bo Isaksson The Biblical Hebrew verb system is an ever ongoing discussion. I refer for this discussion to McFall, Cook, Joosten, Notarius. 2 I will not review the research in this seminar. My aim is instead to 1. point out some remaining issues in the research on the Biblical Hebrew verb system, 2. suggest some methodological approaches that have been successful in the research, 3. and formulate some still open questions that remain to be clarified. Before I begin to enumerate remaining problems in Biblical Hebrew research on the verbal system it is appropriate to state some relatively recent advances in the understanding of the verbal system. One of these obvious advances is the recognition of the Canaanite genetic origin of Biblical Hebrew. This is explicitly pointed out by the recent A handbook of Biblical Hebrew edited by Randall Garr and Steven Fassberg (2016). As Lam and Pardee maintain the Hebrew verbal system must be regarded as the result of a diachronic development from a stage with two prefix conjugations, from an indicative and a jussive *yaqtul and an imperfective yaqtulu which both merged in a Biblical Hebrew yiqtol. So in the light of Amarna Canaanite and other Northwest Semitic evidence there are two prefixed verbal forms in Biblical Hebrew, not just one. This was proposed more than a century ago by scholars such as Hans Bauer, who called them "Kurz-Aorist" and "Voll-Aorist". But it is thanks to the achievements of Moran, Rainey and recently Baranowski that Amarna Canaanite has been shown to have its own peripheral Canaanite scribal tradition based on education in scribal families, 1 Paper read at the Semitic Seminar in Uppsala, April 4, 2017. 2 McFall 1982 The Enigma of the Hebrew Verbal System. Solutions from Ewald to the Present Day; Cook 2012 Time and the biblical Hebrew verb: The expression of tense, aspect, and modality in biblical Hebrew; Joosten 2012 The verbal system of Biblical Hebrew. A new synthesis elaborated on the basis of classical; Notarius 2007 The system of verbal tenses in archaic and classical biblical Hebrew poetry (in Hebrew). and it is more than probable that this family based scribal culture continued in Israel in the first temple period. Another advancement in recent research is recognition of poetry as part of the corpus of SBH. Since Archaic Biblical Hebrew is attested only in a limited number of poetic texts, "the remaining non-archaic poems (including the prophetic texts) of the Hebrew Bible need to be assigned some place in the diachronic continuum". It is unavoidable to include in the SBH poetry "biblical poems that are not overtly archaic or demonstrably late." (Lam and Pardee 2016: 2). Another achievement in Hebrew research is the common recognition of historical stages in Biblical Hebrew. Scholars of Biblical Hebrew today speak of four stages, Archaic Biblical Hebrew, Standard Biblical Hebrew, Transitional Biblical Hebrew, and Late Biblical Hebrew. It is also generally agreed among scholars that Epigraphic Hebrew, the Hebrew language that is archaeologically attested, is essentially identical to SBH prose (Lam and Pardee 2016: 1-2). Recently the verbal system of Late Biblical Hebrew has been devoted a monograph study by Ohad Cohen, The verbal tense system in late Biblical Hebrew prose (2013), 3 and a solid foundation of the study of archaic poetic texts is laid by a monograph of Tania Notarius, The verb in archaic Biblical poetry (2013). 4 In spite of the objections from Young and others, the linguistic data indicate that there are diachronic layers in the Hebrew text and these layers conform to the picture of Biblical Hebrew as a language in a Canaanite historical setting, with diachronic stages that can be traced in the received texts. But now to some of the remaining problems in the research on the Biblical Hebrew verb system. I will discuss: 1. The problem of the origin of the 'consecutive tenses', 2. The problem of the verbal system in poetry and a discussion of the concept of 'modes of discourse', 3. The problem of a 'Northern', Israelian, dialect. 1. The problem of the origin of the 'consecutive tenses' 'Consecutive tenses' is the term commonly used for the quite unique interaction between the imperfective yiqtol and we-qatal on the one hand and qatal and wayyiqtol on the other hand.

1. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. In the present work, the fragmentation hypothesis allows us to separate, in fact, several distinct uses: episodic, gnomic and semi-gnomic. Here we discuss the semi-gnomic uses. Much has been written about the characterization of the polysemic Y. On the one extreme, it approximates a simple future, say similar to its use in modern Hebrew or late Aramaic. On the other extreme we find aspectual, modal and gnomic uses of quite a different character, and attempts to put all these uses under one simple label have proven, so far, artificial 1 . Particularly unclear is the line which separates between the episodic and gnomic uses of It is extremely difficult to classify these sentences in terms of tnse and aspect; however, a clear criterion separates the last two from the first three: the fact that Y appears on a subordinate clause. In fact, a subordinate conjunctive clause in Y is always semi-gnomic and of a parenthetic/exegetic nature, or describes a parallel ac...