(1) Examples of epic and religious poetry, often or occasionally, regardless of when composed, retain or make use of archaic features that are otherwise unattested in “standard biblical Hebrew” (examples: Gen 49, Ex 15, Numb 23-24, Deut 32 and 33, Jdg 5, Hab 3, Ps 29). On grounds of referential content and literary context, some of these compositions, Jdg 5 for example, would appear to be written in imperfectly preserved “archaic biblical Hebrew” (ABH); others, like Hab 3, deploy archaic features within the context of relatively late (late 7^th-early 6^th cent. bce) “standard biblical Hebrew” poetry.

(2) “Standard biblical Hebrew” (SBH) is the classical literary language of the 9^th-6^th cent. bce. It is preserved in narrative, law, and poetry but not pristinely, in the Primary History (Gen-2 Kgs); in Hosea, Amos, Micah, Isa 1-39, Nahum, Zephaniah, and Habakkuk among the classical prophets; in many of the Psalms and Prov 10-31 among the writings. Historical-critical considerations tip the balance in favor of the proposed time frame of composition of the above texts, each of which is nonetheless heterogeneous. Supplementation in more or less perfect imitation of the linguistic profile of the base text must be allowed for. For example, Num 24:23-24 reads like a vaticinium ex eventu (prophecy after the event) of the Hellenistic period. The 9^th-6^th cent. bce dating of the aforementioned text units, furthermore, does not apply to all aspects of their text. Orthographical, phonological, and morphological detail preserved in the extant manuscript tradition reflects developments that cannot be dated before Hellenistic times, on rare occasions, before Roman times.

(3) Epigraphic Hebrew (EH) represents spoken and administrative Hebrew in Judah of the 10^th-6^th cent. bce; later, after a hiatus in which Hebrew for administrative purposes may not have been permitted, of the time of the anti-Persian revolts of the mid-4^th cent. bce (the ban seems to have been contravened); and again, during the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2^nd cent. bce. Thereafter, with the establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom and beyond its fall, up to and including the Bar Kochba Revolt, Hebrew was employed for a variety of purposes, not exclusively, but alongside of Aramaic and Greek. In EH epistolary texts, colloquialisms unattested in the literary language occur with some frequency.

(4) SBH as attested in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Lamentations, corpora whose contents are datable with relative certainty on grounds of referential content, is laced with elements of the spoken vernacular of 6^th cent. bce Judah. The elements of “transitional” Hebrew contained in these texts do not require assignment to redactional activity of the 5^th cent. bce or later, assuming that such took place. The linguistic profiles of these books, apart from shared innovations in terms of orthographic, phonological, and morphological features in common with the rest of the Tanakh and datable to the Hellenistic and Roman periods, fit the 6^th cent. bce if that century is held to be transitional linguistically as well as historically.

(5) Based again on considerations of referential content, Obadiah, Isaiah 40-55, 56-66, Haggai, Zechariah 1-9, and Malachi are to be dated, like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Lamentations, to the 6^th cent. cent. bce. Though other explanations are conceivable, the linguistic profiles of the nine named corpora seem to stand “between” the classical examples of SBH cited earlier, and uncontroversial examples of “Late Biblical Hebrew” listed below.

(6) A number of components of the Hebrew Bible are hard to date with confidence. Prov 1-9 seem to be written in SBH. There are no compelling reasons to date any part of it to the 5^th cent. bce or later. But Prov 1-9 is sometimes dated to the late Persian or early Hellenistic period based on historical-critical considerations. With Francis Andersen, I am inclined to date the book of Job to the 9^th or 8^th cent. bce, though many prefer a Persian period date based on a (tenuous) theory of the history of religious thought in ancient Israel. In any case, Job’s diction and vocabulary set it apart from all other known examples of AH. Jonah is datable to the 6^th bce, but could be later. As Edward Campbell maintained, Ruth is datable to the 8^th bce. The Song of Songs has a linguistic profile all its own. If it is early, consonant with its use of Tirzah, the capital of Israel in the 9^th cent. bce and counterpart to Jerusalem in that time frame only, as a standard of admiration, that would mean that spoken Hebrew at a very early point was characterized by features that become ubiquitous in middle Hebrew. Those linguistic features have led many to class it among the latest works to be found in the Tanakh.

(7) It is relatively uncontroversial that 1-2 Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Joel 3-4; Zechariah 9-12, Qohelet, Esther, and Daniel are to be dated on grounds of referential content and historical-critical considerations to the 4^th-2^nd cent. bce. The linguistic profiles of these corpora do not constitute a tightly knit unit. They nonetheless all exemplify “Late Biblical Hebrew” (LBH), though that moniker is often used as if 1-2 Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Esther alone were in view. Attested linguistic variation in the late Persian and early-to-mid Hellenistic periods is extensive, and only increases when works written in Hebrew in the same period that did not become part of the Tanakh are included, for example, Jubilees and other narrative texts attested at Qumran, which assimilate language and style to classical SBH models, not 1-2 Chronicles; and Ben Sira.

(8) Qumran Hebrew (QH) of the late 2^nd-1^st cent. bce is a many-splendored thing. The Hebrew of the pesharim; of the Hodayot; of the Songs of the Sabbath; of the community rules and the war rule; of 4QMMT, is diverse in nature. It is an interesting laboratory in which to work. Differences in sociolinguistic register and literary genre, not provenance, and not diachrony, must account for all of the linguistic variation.

Is it wise to keep teaching the Hebrew of the Bible as if it were an enclosed garden to be cultivated apart from the encroaching forest of the Hebrew of non-biblical texts written in the same general time frame? I would think not. But if that is true, it’s about time that a reference manual of ancient Hebrew be prepared, in which AH, SBH, EH, and LBH texts, inclusive of Ben Sira and QH, receive equal consideration.

A basic bibliography on this subject matter ought to be published online. I have not had time to put one together to date.

Prov 27:17 may illustrate. The MT reads as follows.

בַּרְזֶל בְּבַרְזֶל יָ֑חַד

וְאִישׁ יַחַד פְּנֵי־רֵעֵהוּ

Iron on iron, together;
a man, the face of his fellow, together.

More woodenly, so as to approximate the syntax in translation:

Iron on iron, in the same unit of time and place;
a man; in the same unit of time and place, the face of his fellow.

יחד means as a unit, in the same unit of time and/or place. יחד precedes or follows the syntactic string it modifies. From HALOT, examples of the former: Hos 11:8; Mic 2:12; Ps 41:8; Job 3:18; examples of the latter: 1 Sam 11:11; Isa 27:4; Jer 48:7; Ps 40:15; Job 34:15; Ezra 4:3. When it precedes, יחד modifies what follows, but is also anaphoric to a discrete, preceding semantic whole. For example, Psalm 141:10 as construed in the MT:

יִפְּלוּ בְמַכְמֹרָיו רְשָׁעִים

יַחַד אָנֹכִי עַד־אֶעֱבוֹר

Let the wicked fall into their own nets,
with me, right there, until I pass by.

That is, Let the wicked . . . ; in the same unit of time and place, (may) I (be), until I . . . MT Prov 27:17 has an equivalent construction in miniature: ואיש יחד פני־רעהוּ and (the case of) a man; in the same time and place, the face of his fellow.

On this understanding, Prov 27:17 contains no verbs. Perhaps that seems strange. But compare e.g. Prov 27:19.

Tur-Sinai, whom Fox essentially follows, provides an interpretation of Prov 27:17 that fits the MT as it stands and as analyzed above. To be sure, Fox sets aside the Masoretic vocalization in favor of one of his own devising (discussed below). Key graf (Fox 2009: 811):

Just as (magnetized) iron is attracted to iron, so is a man attracted to his fellow’s face; he is drawn to look into it, for the sake of fellowship and communication (Tur-Sinai, p. 24). [Prov 27:]17-19 share the theme of fellowship.

The interpretation of the verse depends on two ambiguous words, both spelled יחד consonantally. In the MT’s vocalization they mean “together,” hence, “Iron on iron together, and a man together (with) the face of his fellow.”

This was Ewald’s interpretation (1870, § 217h), though he unnecessarily thought of יחד as a preposition in Prov 27:17b. Fox’s diction suggests but does not explicitly require the same assumption.

Thus far MT Prov 27:17, and a plain sense reading thereof, in harmony with 27:19. But that is not the Prov 27:17 Bible readers know and love. The KJV: Iron sharpeneth iron;/  So a man sharpeneth the countenance of his fellow.

Alternative Construals

It is simplest, if one wants to arrive at the traditional interpretation - as old as the LXX, Peshitta, Targum, and Jerome - to revocalize MT. On the traditional interpretation, יחד is a verbal form meaning (iron/man) sharpens. DBH (2007:275) notes without attribution the following proposal:

בַּרְזֶל בְּבַרְזֶל יֻחַד

וְאִישׁ יָחֵד פְּנֵי־רֵעֵהוּ

Iron by means of iron is sharpened;
a man sharpens the face of his fellow.

On this analysis, the first form is Hophal (a form attested in Ezek 21:14.15.16), the second Hiphil, from חדד sharpen. HALOT (2001:201) conjectures accordingly. Jerome also seems to have understood the first יחד as a passive verb (acuitur).

DBH on its part refrains from conjectural emendation, and construes the forms per their vocalization in MT as from an otherwise unattested חדה II sharpen, Qal in the first instance, Hiphil in the second.

That may sound fine, but it must be emphasized that the solution depends on positing an otherwise unknown חדה II sharpen. Furthermore, the postulated apocopated imperfects are enigmatic, even ungrammatical. The construal of MT’s vocalization as G and H forms, respectively, of a hypothetical lamed he verb, will be discussed shortly.

The suggestion goes back to David Kimchi (Michlol 126a) and was taken up by Delitzsch, König (in his grammar, 1:373-4; in his dictionary, 99a), BDB, and several others (references in Delitzsch and BDB). The latest supporter of this arduous hypothesis is de Waard (2008: 54*). BDB’s construal of MT Prov 27:17 is particularly remarkable:

בַּרְזֶל בְּבַרְזֶל יָ֑חַד

וְאִישׁ יַחַד פְּנֵי־רֵעֵהוּ

Let iron by means of iron grow sharp,
and let a man sharpen the countenance of his friend.

The solution has the advantage of offering a better explanation than that of Delitzsch - “poetic license”- for the ex hypothesi apocopated perfects. Its disadvantage is that it supposes two postpositive jussives. That is unexpected and unjustified. If an otherwise unattested חדה II sharpen actually existed in ancient Hebrew, with a G and H stem, and a proverb with the suggested meaning were to be imagined that uses it, one would expect the following:

יִחַד  or) יַחַד( בַּרְזֶל בְּבַרְזֶל

וְאִישׁ יַחַד פְּנֵי־רֵעֵהוּ

Let iron by means of iron grow sharp,
and let a man sharpen the countenance of his fellow.

That is not what we have. Besides, jussives in an aphorism are unlikely in the first place.

יַחַד, as Delitzsch notes, fits the pattern of וַיַּחַץ Gen 32:8; Qal or Hiphil, per וַיַעַל. יִחַד fits the pattern of יִחַר

Fox rejects the traditional interpretation on the grounds that “there is no evidence that ‘sharpen the face’ means to challenge and sharpen one’s wits.” (2009: 811). That is a fair objection, though not necessarily a damning one. The meaning may be another. The common tendency is toחלה פני  mollify the face of someone whose favor one seeks (Prov 19:6). But among true fellows, as between parent and child, chastisement and rebuke are sometimes called for. The face of the chastised one might be thought of as “sharpened” in the process. In Job 14:20, God is the one who משנה פני “alters the visage of” the one he is to dispatch. A ghoulish prospect; even so, it is also possible to alter the visage of a friend with the intent of forcing a change of heart. On this understanding, Prov 27:17 is bookended by 27:21: a sharp rebuke is preferable to hollow praise.

A reformulation of Prov 27:17 is found in b. Ta‛anit 7a. In context, Piel חדד “sharpen someone” seems to mean “sharpen one’s moral intelligence.”

אמר רבי חמא אמר רבי חנינא

מאי דכתיב ברזל בברזל יחד

לומר לך מה ברזל זה אחד מחדד את חבירו

אף שני תלמידי חכמים מחדדין זה את זה בהלכה

Rabbi Ḥama said: Rabbi Ḥanina said:
how is it that it is written, “iron on iron yaḥad [together]”?¹

To tell you, how an eḥad [single] iron meḥaded [sharpens] his fellow.

How much more, two students of the sages meḥadedin [sharpen] each other with halacha.

But Prov 27:17bיחד פני רעהו  means, ex hypothesi, “sharpen the face = wits of his fellow.” Possible, but otherwise unexampled.

Fox revocalizes the verbs of MT Prov 27:17’s to Qal imperfects of יחד be joined.

בַּרְזֶל בְּבַרְזֶל יֵחָד

וְאִישׁ יֵחַד פְּנֵי־רֵעֵהוּ

Iron joins to iron,
and a man joins [with] the face of his fellow.

To be sure, a transitive use of the Qal is otherwise unattested (the verb יחד only occurs twice in the corpus). Aside from that, the proposal is unobjectionable. But then, MT, which conveys the same sense, seems less objectionable.

One more solution might be mentioned, that of Meinhold:

וְאִישׁ יְחַד פְּנֵי־רֵעֵהוּ

but a man, let him gladden the face of his fellow.

On this understanding, חדה פני רעהו gladden the face of one’s fellow (not otherwise attested, but compare Piel חדה gladden someone [Ps 21:7], with a person as a direct object) would be an idiom not that distant from היטיב פנים improve the face (Prov 16:13). The result, to be sure, seems a bit incongruous. One might adopt Fox’s proposal for 27:17a and Meinhold’s proposal for 27:17b. The result would still be disjointed, but some proverbs are such. A plausible unstated premise is reconstructible without too much strain: iron joins with iron; let a man [join with his fellow and] gladden his face. On disjointed proverbs and their place within sentence literature, see Fox 2009: 494-498.

Conclusion

It is not that unusual for a plain sense reading of the MT to yield a sense at odds with all or many of the ancient versions. It is not that unusual, once MT’s vocalization is set aside, for a host of alternative and more or less unobjectionable construals to present themselves. Prov 27:17 is a case in point.

MT Prov 27:17 makes unobjectionable sense. I see no reason to set it aside.

On the other hand, MT Prov 27:17 revocalized per HALAT/HALOT, presupposed in its entirety, it appears, by Jerome, is also unobjectionable.

I see no way of adjudicating between the two options. I am tempted to think the traditional non-MT understanding of the text is older than MT’s construal, which nonetheless is very old, as old as the consonantal text it vocalizes. Otherwise, one might have expected a disambiguating יוחד in Prov 27:17b.

The other proposals discussed above are not without merit, but have the disadvantage that they require the postulation of unknown or poorly attested forms and/or constructions.

It would be helpful if a translation of the Tanakh that is always faithful to MT were prepared. Not once has such a translation seen the light of day. If it were to see the light of day, MT Prov 27:17 might well be translated as suggested above. On the other hand, it would be helpful if that same translation of the Tanakh footnoted every important differentiated understanding of specific biblical passages to which the ancient versions attest.

A ridiculous assumption undergirds the pseudo-classical approach to text criticism: one text, the earliest text we can reconstruct based on available evidence, is authentic, whereas subsequent reformulations of said text are to be regarded as corruptions. Not so. Reformulations are not corruptions. They are reformulations. Furthermore, even textual variation caused by mechanical error becomes a reformulation when the error is established as an ineludible component of a received text. In a sense, it is oxymoronic to speak of any textual detail in a traditional text as if it were a corruption.

¹ Assuming that a double play on words is posited,אחד  and מחדד on יחד in its usual sense.

Bibliography

Walter Baumgartner, Ludwig Koehler, and Johann Jakob Stamm, eds., Hebräisches und aramäisches Lexicon zum Alten Testament [HALAT] (5 vols; Leiden: Brill, 1967-1997) Francis Brown, Samuel Rolles Driver, and Charles Augustus Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon [BDB] (repr. of 1906 edition; Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004); Friedrich Delitzsch, Jan de Waard, ed., Biblia Hebraica Quinta. Proverbs (BHQ 17: Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2008); Heinrich Ewald, Ausführliches Lehrbuch der hebräischen Sprache des Alten Bundes (8^th ed.; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1870); Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10-31 (AYB 18B; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Menachem Zevi Kaddari, A Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (Alef-Taw). [DBH] [The letters Alef-Zayin were written by Samuel A. Loewenstamm and Joshua Blau] Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2007; Carl Friedrich Keil und Franz Delitzsch Biblischer Commentar über das alte Testament Theil 4: Poetische Bücher. Bd. 3., Das salomonische Spruchbuch, 1873 (repr. Giessen: Brunnen, 1985); David Kimḥi, ספר מכלול (ed. I. Rittenberg; Lyck, 1862); Eduard König, Historisch-kritisches Lehrgebäude der hebräischen Sprache (2 vols. in 3; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1881-1897; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1986); idem, Hebräisches und aramäisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament (7^th ed.; Leipzig, 1936; repr. Vaduz/Leichtenstein: Sändig Reprint Verlag, 1986); Arndt Meinhold, Die Sprüche (2 vols; ZB 16; Zürich: Theologischer Verlag 1991); M. E. J. Richardson, ed., The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament:Study Edition. Vols. 1-2 [HALOT; translation and revision of HALAT] (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002 [1994-1999]); Naphtali Herz Tur-Sinai [Harry Torczyner], פשוטו של מקרא 4/1 (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1967)

I have pleasant memories of the dinner. Thirty people gathered around a common table; amicable conversation filled the air. The lighting and acoustics were conducive to conversation, an advantage over meeting in a restaurant. The bar staff served a large quantity of German beer, and joined in when, with the help of two bottles of lemon grappa from Sicily, we toasted to “ancient Hebrew poetry,” “A-B parallelism,” and “friends.”

The evening raised $650 for an Episcopalian charity dedicated to rebuilding projects in one of the neighborhoods, Central City, hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. We were also treated to conversation and questions around Michael Fox’s Anchor Bible commentary on the book of Proverbs. Chris Heard asks for advice on teaching biblical wisdom literature. He would have found the back-and-forth between Ray van Leeuwen and Michael Fox very stimulating.

I was taught, I think correctly, that all of biblical wisdom literature is “mainstream,” Proverbs but also Job and Qohelet, to which Ben Sira might be added. The fact is, the wise of ancient Israel were comfortable with asking sharp questions. Compare Pss 49 and 73. The purpose of a collection of aphorisms like the book of Proverbs is not emphasized enough, though it is stated in black and white in the prologue (Prov 1:6):

לְהָבִין מָשָׁל וּמְלִיצָה

דִּבְרֵי חֲכָמִים וְחִידֹתָם

For taking to heart¹ consideration² and epigram,
the words of the wise and their dilemmas.

“Dilemmas” in the sense of the riddles they pose, but also, the enigmas that life poses, and the wise pose in turn, without any pretense to being able to resolve them:

טוֹב לָשֶׁבֶת עַל־פִּנַּת־גָּג

מֵאֵשֶׁת מִדְיָנִים וּבֵית חָבֶר

Better to have one’s domicile on the corner of a roof
than a contentious woman and a noisy house.³ (Prov 21:9 = 25:24).

The author of Psalm 49 is overwhelmed by the enigmatic case of the filthy rich. He prefaces him poem on that subject with the following words.

אַטֶּה לְמָשָׁל אָזְנִי

אֶפְתַּח בְּכִנּוֹר חִידָתִי

I will turn my attention⁴ to a consideration,
I will expound⁵ my dilemma to the music of the lyre⁶.

The dilemmas the wise ponder are the ones everyone is confronted with: the challenges of believing in justice in an unjust world, the need to fight off the temptation to blow one’s stack, to enrich oneself at the expense of others, to sleep with a coworker as opposed to one’s own spouse. The list goes on.

One of the topics of sentence literature in all cultures is friendship. Two passages from biblical tradition come right to mind: Prov 27:17, whose sense according to the received Masoretic text is virtually unknown, since almost all translations present it (and without attribution) in terms of its beautiful reformulation in the Talmud, b. Ta‛anit 7a; and ben Sira 9:10.14-16, also virtually unknown in its original formulation, since translations of ben Sira prepared for the general public translate the Greek with only occasional reliance on the Hebrew where available. See my next post.

Notes

¹ Lit., discern, in the sense of cognitive-and-emotional assimilation.

² The translation of משל by proverb is hardly broad enough to cover its actual set of referents. In the book of Proverbs, it is not only the aphorisms Prov 10-29 contain that are rightly called משלים considerations, but also, the full-blown speeches of Prov 1-9. Compare the use of משל in Psalm 49, cited below.

³ The likelihood that בית חבר means “noisy house” was established on the basis of attested usage of Akkadian ḫabāru I make noise and ḫubūru II clamour, bustle by J. J. Finkelstein, Chaim Cohen, and Moshe Held. References and discussion in the recently published and indispensable reference tool authored by Hayim ben Yoself Tawil, An Akkadian Lexical Companion for Biblical Hebrew (Jersey City: Ktav, 2009) 100.

⁴ Lit., my ear.

⁵ Lit., open, introduce.

⁶ Lit., with the lyre.

Within the Tanakh, the language is referred to as יהודית Judahite in contradistinction toארמית  Aramaic (a lingua franca) and אשדודית Ashdodite (a local dialect, like Judahite). See 2 Kgs 18:26, 28 // Isa 36:11, 13; Neh 13:24; cf. 2 Chr 32:18; Dan 2:4.

In another instance, the language of the land of Judah is referred to as (a species of)שפת כנען  the lip of Canaan (Isa 19:18) in contradistinction to the native tongue of the Egyptians. Linguistic analysis in fact demonstrates that the language of the land of Judah known from the Bible, inscriptions, and texts outside of the Tanakh such as Ben Sira and non-biblical compositions among the Dead Sea scrolls, is part of the Canaanite group of languages. Besides Judahite, Israelite (attested in the Samaria ostraca and at Kuntillet ‛Ajrud), Phoenician (also attested at Ekron in Philistia), Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite belong to this group. Though it is somewhat of a geographic outlier, and is attested in the Late Bronze Age rather than in the Iron Age, Ugaritic belongs in this family, as does Late Bronze Age Canaanite insofar as it is recoverable from the El-Amarna letters and scattered inscriptions in cuneiform alphabetic script found in Canaan proper (at Sarepta, Kamed el-Lōz, Naḥal Tabor, Taanach, and Beth Shemesh).  

Abecedaries, monumental texts, funerary inscriptions, epistolary texts, economic texts, and graffiti in Judahite have been discovered in various locations, mostly from the 8^th-6^th cent. bce, for example, Jerusalem, Lachish, Makkedah (Khirbet el-Qom), Arad, Wadi Murabba‛at, Gibeon, Tell Qasile, and Meṣad Ḥashavyahu (Yavneh-Yam). The find sites lie within the borders of ancient Judah and Benjamin and the part of the coastal plain assigned to the tribe of Dan in Josh 19:40-48 and controlled by King Uzziah/ Azariah of Judah in the mid-8^th cent. bce according to 2 Chr 26:10. A source of data of the same language, already noted: Judahite place names and personal names attested in neo-Assyrian, neo-Babylonian, and late Babylonian documents of the same time frame. On the basis of that data, Iron Age Egyptian evidence of Judahite place names, and LXX transcriptions of onomastica, a reconstruction of the phonology of First Temple Judahite, in partial autonomy from data of the language’s secondary period of attestation, is not impossible. 

Canaanite along with Aramaic make up the Northwest branch and, together with Arabic, the Central branch of the widely dispersed Semitic family of languages. In turn, the Semitic phylum is one component of the family of languages known as Afro-Asiatic (AA). Archaic and middle-stage AA languages are distinguished from non-AA languages by the widespread use of internal inflection (ablaut) of roots of three (sometimes two or four) consonants in order to create entire classes of verbal and nominal morphology. AA languages dominate contemporary SW Asia, N and NE Africa, and also occur in W Africa. The chief branches of AA are Egyptian (now extinct; later called Coptic, which only survives as a liturgical language), Berber in N Africa (the most archaic example of which is Tuareg), Chadic in sub-Saharan Africa (the best known example of which is Hausa); the Cushitic (Somali) and Omotic families in the Horn of Africa, and the better-known Semitic family, most of whose members retain the archaic features noted above and share a core vocabulary.

Modern dialects of Arabic, Ethiopic, South Arabian, Hebrew, and Aramaic are the best-known examples of living Semitic languages. Native speakers thereof number 500 million in aggregate. Alongside these vernaculars coexist languages of learned tradition: the classical Arabic of the Quran and the greater Muslim tradition; the ancient Hebrew and Aramaic of the Tanakh, the middle Hebrew and Aramaic of Talmud Torah, Jewish worship, and poetry and exegesis; the ancient Coptic, Ge’ez (a dialect of Ethiopic), and Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) of discrete Christian traditions.

Of the languages of learned tradition in this series, ancient Hebrew is the most venerable. Preserved in an unbroken tradition of transmission for over two millennia, Hebrew holds a privileged place in the imagination of Jews and Christians. Sometimes thought to be the language of both Eden and Heaven, one thing is clear: it is the primary language of the shared Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. As such, it is deemed to hold within it pure instruction and fateful promise.

Ancient Hebrew as transmitted by later tradition echoes without cease in the language of assembly, prayer, and study of observant Jews. As is only proper, that language and literature is taught in universities and seminaries throughout the world, wherever the traditions of Judaism and Christianity are thought to be irreplaceable elements of a common heritage. It should not be forgotten, nor does it require defense, that the language and literature in question has a highly traditioned quality, which can but need not be an obstacle to historical inquiry.

But, at least within a university context, it is important that ancient Hebrew as transmitted by tradition of the 9^th – 12^th cent. ce and ancient Hebrew insofar as we would reconstruct it, based on all the available evidence, in the 10^th, 6^th, and 3^rd cent. bce, be rigorously distinguished and not conflated.

Bibliography

Jeremy M. Hutton and Aaron D. Rubin, “Hebrew Language,” in The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible 2 (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007) 768-778 

Ancient Hebrew’s primary period of attestation covers a period of more than a thousand years, from about 1000 bce – 135 ce. Extant texts of this time frame, inclusive of, but by no means limited to, texts preserved in the Hebrew Bible, are written on stone, pottery, metal, papyrus, and parchment, and make use of a total of 22 graphemes to denote up to 25 consonantal phonemes. A few graphemes, ו w, י y, ה h, andא  (the glottal stop), serve first in word-final position and later, in certain medial contexts, to mark vowels. But even in fuller orthographies, the texts do not mark most vowels, and vowel markers are multivalent; for example, ו covers both /o/ and /u/ vowels. For these reasons, the phonology, morphology, syntax, and prosody of ancient Hebrew is, in varying degrees, a matter of reconstruction. The texts also contain delimitation markers, spaces and/or dots, separating one word and one text block from another.

Varieties of ancient Hebrew (AH) are documented within its primary period of attestation. The corpus is alive with linguistic variation, conditioned by factors as diverse as register, genre, provenance, and diachrony. This is true across the texts that make up the Tanakh, and across epigraphic epistolary texts covering the entire chronological range, from Tel Qeiyafa, Lachish, and Arad to Bar Kochba. Another example: the linguistic profile of the sentence literature of Proverbs differs from that of Ben Sira as preserved in the Masada fragments; and that of Ben Sira from that of Pirqei Avot, an example of middle Hebrew (MH) on the other side of the artificial divide of the linguistic continuum of pre-modern Hebrew. The diverse forms of Hebrew in which non-sectarian and sectarian compositions found at Qumran were written are also examples of ancient Hebrew.

The Hebrew of post-biblical Jewish tradition preserved thereafter in Jewish tradition, the Hebrew of the Mishna, Talmud, Midrash, Piyyut, and so on, may be classified as middle Hebrew (עברית בינונית Ivrít benonít).¹ Modern Hebrew (NH, “new Hebrew’) developed as a secularization of middle Hebrew from the middle of the nineteenth century forward, and received a push from pioneers like Eliezer ben-Yehudah. It is now the spoken and written tongue of the state of Israel, with 8 million speakers.

The phonological detail of the Tanakh preserved in ancient reading traditions - Palestinian, Tibero-Palestinian, and Standard Tiberian; the Babylonian and Yemenite; in the case of the Pentateuch, the Samaritan reading tradition; but also, what can be gathered from biblical manuscripts with plene orthography found at Qumran; phonetic transcriptions of names and untranslated words in the LXX and larger Hellenistic Jewish tradition, and of entire passages in fragments of the second column of Origen’s Hexapla – said detail has roots in the pre-Hellenistic period, but nonetheless reflects developments which occurred in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. This is the secondary period of attestation of ancient Hebrew, in which specific reading traditions were preserved and recorded to an ever greater extent and with ever greater precision.

The most important Hebrew manuscripts of the kind just mentioned, of the Tanakh or portions thereof, range in date from about 850 to 1100 ce; for the Samaritan Pentateuch, from about 1100 to 1400 ce. The pinnacle of achievement within this period of attestation was attained by the masoretic codices of the standard Tiberian tradition. Pandects that encompassed the entire Tanakh, Codex Aleppo (ca. 915) and Codex Leningradensis (1009) in particular, for the precision and wealth of phonological and prosodic detail, are among the greatest linguistic artifacts of all time. The accuracy and completeness of the reproduction of linguistic data, the inclusion of variant readings, the panoply of marginal and end notes (in Aramaic, not Hebrew!), is unrivaled in the history of text transmission.  

Ancient Hebrew as pronounced today according to religious and/or academic convention is emphatically not the way it was pronounced during its primary period of attestation. The differences occasionally rise to the level of divergent grammatical analysis. This is undeniable once coeval sources of evidence for the pronunciation of the language are taken into account: in particular, place names and personal names from Judah attested in neo-Assyrian, neo-Babylonian, and late Babylonian documents. For example: banay barqa for בני ברק benei beraq; ḫazaqia(u) for חזקיהו ḥizqiyahu; iaua for יהוא jehu.² On the basis of the same evidence and Greek transcriptions, it is clear that the inventory of consonantal phonemes in ancient Hebrew in the primary period of attestation was larger at first. ע and ח, not just ש, did double-duty and stood for one of two possible phonemes. Nonetheless, the merger of these phonemes, and of שׂ /ś/ to ס /s/, was well underway in the last phases of AH in the primary period of its attestation. It is also clear that in the course of transmission as documentable in the secondary period of its attestation, some features of AH grammar came to be poorly understood and were less than adequately transmitted, for example, qal passives; infinitive absolutes; paragogic nuns; rarely, the vocalization of waw before a yiqtol. The phonology of Tiberian Masoretic Hebrew contains within it a great number of clues to earlier stages of ancient Hebrew phonology; nonetheless, it represents a development away from the phonology of ancient Hebrew as known to us from the primary period of its attestation. For example, sporadic defective spellings of vowels occurring beyond the nucleus of the stressed syllable in epigraphic Hebrew suggest that particular classes of verbs and nouns were stressed in all contexts in the First Temple period as they are in Tiberian Masoretic Hebrew in pausal position only. Thus we find וע֫ת instead of ועתה; שלח֫ת in place of שלחתי; הי֫ת instead of היתה. Other examples: insertion of an anaptyctic vowel in final position consonant clusters and before final position pharyngeals and laryngeals (but not the glottal stop), over against a progressive lack thereof in earlier data, working backwards; raising of /a/ to /i/ in closed unaccented syllables, e.g. Tiberian MT מגרש migraš over against magras (Jerome) and מזמור mizmor over against μαζμωρ mazmor (Secunda); reduction of /a/ to shwa in unaccented syllables, e.g. מגדו megiddo, over against cuneiform magiddu; mutation of /i/ to /a/ in originally closed accented syllables, e.g. גת gath over against gint (or gimt, with partial dissimilation) in neo-Assyrian sources. Finally, evidence from Persian period Aramaic, a language in an adstrate relationship with coeval Hebrew then and thereafter such that features of Aramaic made their way into Hebrew and features of Hebrew into Aramaic in communities in which both were employed, suggests that fricativization of non-emphatic plosives (בגדכפת) in post-vocalic position is a phenomenon which gathered steam from the Persian period on. The weakening or elision of laryngeals/ pharyngeals and the non-initial glottal stop, on the other hand, characterized spoken Hebrew in some times and places far more than others, and must be considered a possibility even in the earliest of times.

The sense of the texts in the Tanakh, the particular nuances of words and phrases in context, the eloquence of its rhetoric, the content of its instruction, and the poetics of its narrative, prayer, and prophecy, all this and more is a deserving object of study and a source of fascination for people of diverse persuasions. The language and literature in question can now be studied against a richer linguistic background than ever before. Whoever chooses not to study the Tanakh in the light of what can be learned from linguistic analysis of the entire corpus of ancient Hebrew texts, and of the corpora of extant texts in cognate languages on top of that, is committed to a self-defeating enterprise. Whoever chooses not to study biblical Hebrew in full awareness of the distinction between its primary and secondary periods of attestation is doomed to retroject elements of the latter into his understanding of the former.

¹ The division of Hebrew into three parts, old, middle, and new, is in accord with a tradition among Semitists that goes back to Gotthelf Bergsträsser (see bibliography below).

² Note the uncontracted diphthong in banay (so also LXX Codex B), the norm, presumably, in First Temple Judahite; barqa points to a qatl formation, whereas MT beraq comes across as an Aramaized version of baraq; ḫazaqia(u) points to a sentence name Yáhu prevailed, possibly reanalyzed as an apocopated yiqtol + yáhu in MT Hebrew (y^e)ḥizqiyahu Yáhu will prevail, or my strength is Yáhu; iaua for יהוא points to a sentence name He is Yah, with the long form of the 3sg pronoun, as in Qumran Hebrew: the forms hú’a and hí’a, spelled הא in both cases originally, may have been the norm in First Temple Judahite, analogous to héma and héna in the 3pl. Caution is in order because of the known tendency of proper names to fossilize earlier linguistic features.

Bibliography

Shmuel Aḥituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (tr. and ed. Anson F. Rainey; Jerusalem: Carta, 2008) [the vocalization of the inscriptions according to the principles of Tiberian Masoretic Hebrew, however helpful to the average reader, is unscientific and without historical foundation]; Gotthelf Bergsträsser, Introduction to the Semitic Languages. Text Specimens and Grammatical Sketches (trans. with notes and bibliography and an appendix on the scripts by Peter T. Daniels; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983 [1928]) [a classic; still worth reading]; Margaretha L. Follmer, The Aramaic Language in the Achaemenid Period. A Study in Linguistic Variation (OLA 68; Leuven: Peeters, 1995 [must background reading for those interested in the study of linguistic variation across the corpus of ancient Hebrew]: W. Randall Garr, Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine 1000-586 b.c.e. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) [Garr distinguishes between “Northern Hebrew” (Israelite) and “Southern Hebrew” (Judahite) on pp. 38-39 and 232-235]; Takamitsu Muraoka and Bezalel Porten, “Phonology,” in A Grammar of Egyptian Aramaic. Second Revised Edition (HdO 32; Leiden: Brill, 2003) 1-42 [the problems that arise in reconstructing the phonology of ancient Aramaic in its primary period of attestation are analogous to those encountered in the case of ancient Hebrew]; Gary Rendsburg, “Ancient Hebrew Phonology,” in Phonologies of Asia and Africa (Including the Caucasus) (ed, Alan S. Kaye; technical advisor, Peter T. Daniels; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997) 65-83 [Rendsburg’s claim that “the [standard Tiberian] Masoretic Text more or less accurately reflects the pronunciation (or at least one pronunciation) of ancient Hebrew in the first millennium b.c.e., i.e., the time of the composition of the biblical books” (68) is belied by his own exposition; it does not accurately reflect such, except through the prism of phonological developments within the biblical period (1200-100 bce) and subsequent to it, developments standard Tiberian Hebrew preserves, which is not to say that the radical reconstructions of the phonology of ancient Hebrew proposed by Zellig Harris and Klaus Beyer, respectively, are on the right track; those reconstructions err in the opposite direction by projecting elements of “proto-Semitic” onto Hebrew of the First Temple period; for the rest, Rendsburg’s assumption that varieties of ancient Hebrew beyond “standard literary Judahite Hebrew” are isolable in the extant corpus of ancient Hebrew is undoubtedly correct, but, from a methodological point of view, he has things backwards: in order to have reliable comparative data to work with, the individual linguistic profiles of discrete corpora such as Iron Age epigraphic Hebrew, Job, Song of Songs, Qohelet, Ben Sira as found in the Masada fragments, Hodayot, 4QMMT, and so on, need to be thoroughly explored, compared with each other, and compared with “standard literary Judahite Hebrew,” before idiosyncratic features within the core corpus of literary Jerusalemite Hebrew are associated with alternative dialects, “Israelian” or some other; for Rendsburg’s latest attempt to isolate "Israelian" features, see idem, “Israelian Hebrew Features in Deuteronomy 33,” in Mishneh Todah: Studies in Deuteronomy and Its Cultural Environment in Honor of Jeffrey H. Tigay (ed. Nili Sacher Fox, David A. Glatt-Gilad; and Michael J. Williams, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009) 167-184]  

In a subsequent post, I will take up the issue of linguistic variation across the corpus of ancient Hebrew in more detail.

Educational blogging of the kind I try to offer here, like all learning and teaching, is produced at significant cost. It is not free to me. It is not free to those who ensure that higher education in biblical studies exists, though gifts in kind, donations, fees paid for services, and tax levies of various kinds. It is not free to you either.

The blogging I do is possible thanks to decades-long education provided by a variety of public and private institutions and paid for by governments, churches, synagogues, and private individuals in the following locations: the United States, Canada, Israel, Syria, Italy, Germany, and the UK.

Even that long list is reductive. The bottom line is clear. The real cost of my education in the field of biblical studies, a very small portion of which I paid for out of my own pocket, without a doubt runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars on the most conservative of estimates.

It wasn’t free to me. It isn’t free to my employer, a local church. It never was and never will be free to society and especially, societies of various kinds within society.

But, you may object, it’s still free to you.

Not in your life.

For example, my bookshelf is filled with borrowed books from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and from Marquette University in Milwaukee. Services made possible by tax levies and charitable contributions. If you are a resident of the state of Wisconsin, you help pay for my education, and even if you are not, you help pay for it through the books I receive from wherever you are located via interlibrary loan. And that is a very small piece of the puzzle.

Education of any kind, including the kind a blog is capable of delivering, is not free to the user. In order to learn anything of substance, you have to invest yourself, your time and talent, in a productive fashion. Whatever you get out of this blog, out of any musings on the Bible from an academic and/or spiritual point of view, comes at a significant cost. Either you care enough about the subject matter to invest time, talent, and money into it, or you don’t. If you don’t, go back to People magazine. That’s one world, the entertainment world, that knows about (getting your) money.

The translation is indebted to precedent versions, in particular, NJPSV and Alter. Unlike previous translations, the distinction between yiqtol and qatal is not leveled but retained.

לְךָ דֻמִיָּה תְהִלָּה
אֱלֹהִים בְּצִיּוֹן

וּלְךָ יְשֻׁלַּם־נֶדֶר׃
שֹׁמֵעַ תְּפִלָּה
עָדֶיךָ כָּל־בָּשָׂר יָבֹאוּ

דִּבְרֵי עֲוֺנֹת   גָּבְרוּ מֶנִּי
פְּשָׁעֵינוּ אַתָּה תְכַפְּרֵם׃

To you praise is meet,
O God in Zion;

to you shall vows be paid,
O hearer of prayer;
to you all flesh shall come.

Stronger than me the fallout of misdeeds,
our crimes, but you atone for them.

אַשְׁרֵי תִּבְחַר וּתְקָרֵב
יִשְׁכֹּן חֲצֵרֶיךָ

נִשְׂבְּעָה בְּטוּב בֵּיתֶךָ
קְדֹשׁ הֵיכָלֶךָ׃

Happy the one you choose
and to whom you draw near,
who makes your courts his home;

may we be sated with the bounty of your house,
of the holy of your temple.

נוֹרָאוֹת בְּצֶדֶק תַּעֲנֵנוּ
אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׁעֵנוּ

מִבְטָח כָּל־קַצְוֵי־אֶרֶץ
וְיָם רְחֹקִים׃

מֵכִין הָרִים בְּכֹחוֹ
נֶאְזָר בִּגְבוּרָה׃

מַשְׁבִּיחַ שְׁאוֹן יַמִּים
שְׁאוֹן גַּלֵּיהֶם
וַהֲמוֹן לְאֻמִּים׃

וַיִּירְאוּ [יֹשְׁבֵי] קְצָוֺת מֵאוֹתֹתֶיךָ
מוֹצָאֵי־בֹקֶר וָעֶרֶב תַּרְנִין׃

With dread deeds, with justice, you answer me,
O God of our deliverance,

hope of all land’s ends
and of the far seas,

mainstay of mountains
by virtue of his strength,
who is girded with power,

quieter of the seas’ roar,
the roar of their waves,
and the uproar of nations:

May those at land’s ends fear your signs,
may you make the portals of morn and eve
resound with acclaim.

פָּקַדְתָּ הָאָרֶץ וַתְּשֹׁקְקֶהָ
רַבַּת תַּעְשְׁרֶנָּה

פֶּלֶג אֱלֹהִים
מָלֵא מָיִם

תָּכִין דְּגָנָם
כִּי־כֵן תְּכִינֶהָ׃

You took note of the land and soaked it,
greatly you enriched it;

the channel of God
was full of water;

you ready their grain,
for so you ready the earth.

תְּלָמֶיהָ רַוֵּה
נַחֵת גְּדוּדֶיהָ

בִּרְבִיבִים תְּמֹגְגֶנָּה
צִמְחָהּ תְּבָרֵךְ׃ 

Its furrows sating,
its ridges leveling,

you soften it with showers,
its growth you bless.

עִטַּרְתָּ שְׁנַת טוֹבָתֶךָ
וּמַעְגָּלֶיךָ יִרְעֲפוּן דָּשֶׁן׃

יִרְעֲפוּ נְאוֹת מִדְבָּר
וְגִיל גְּבָעוֹת תַּחְגֹּרְנָה׃

לָבְשׁוּ כָרִים הַצֹּאן
וַעֲמָקִים יַעַטְפוּ־בָר
יִתְרוֹעֲעוּ אַף־יָשִׁירוּ׃

You crowned the year with your bounty,
your wagon tracks drip with fatness;

the wild meadows drip,
the hills are girded with joy;

the pastures were clothed with flocks,
the valleys are mantled with grain,
they let out a shout and sing.

Philological Notes

דֻּמִיָּה silence, but that is hard to square with the rest of the psalm. LXX presupposes the vocalization adopted here.

דִּבְרֵי עֲוֺנֹת the fallout of misdeeds: the translation offered follows Delitzsch.  

יֹשְׁבֵי is probably an explanatory gloss.

וַיִּירְאוּ they feared; but a vav-consecutive is not appropriate in context.

רַוֵּה and נַחֵת: to be understood as infinitive absolutes.

The recent leak of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia and the hockey-stick fiasco before that have damaged the credibility, not of climatology, but of climatologists who cook data and pretend to be prophets. Crusading climate scientists have shot themselves in their own foot. For background on the debate, go here and here.

For an up-to-date graph of temperature change from 1850 to the present, go here. The hockey stick, in the light of recalibrations and the last decade, has disappeared. For a graph of carbon dioxide increase in the same period, go here. That graph, a hockey stick indeed, is clearly a poor predictor of temperature fluctuation. For example, in the last ten years, global temperature has stabilized. In the meantime, C02 emissions have continued to climb precipitously.

No one predicted this would happen. The models available 10 years ago were too crude and unreliable to make a prediction of that kind. Nor is it clear that current models are much better. Some climate scientists are predicting a cooling trend for 10 more years; others, for longer still.

Everyone seems to be adjusting their models on the fly. Expect more of the same. I'm not complaining about the adjustment. I'm complaining about the fact that too few people draw the obvious conclusion from these on-the-fly adjustments: we don't know enough about what the future holds in terms of climate change to invest trillion of dollars now in some sort of effort to engineer a stabilization of global temperature. The project is in the realm of science fiction.

Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt make an unassailable point which countless others have also made, including many climate scientists. To paraphrase them, the kind of goals Kyoto sets, even if they were met (and, given the track record of the countries who signed on, absolutely no reason to think that they will), would not have a sufficient impact on temperature to move the planet out of a putatively dangerous climate trajectory into a putatively safe trajectory. That is based on the models backed by the selfsame IPCC.

I often hear: so what? It's a good thing that people jet around and hold conferences in order to encourage people to reduce their carbon footprint, regardless of whether doing so will save the planet from overcooking. Well, they don't quite put it like that, but you get my point. If the very people most up in arms about the size of carbon footprints make few significant changes in their lifestyles in order to reduce their own, why should anyone take their doomsaying seriously?

They themselves do not take it seriously.

I don't believe the doomsaying. I put it in the same category as the CDC's prediction that 80,000 people will die from the swine flu this winter. Parse that prediction, its intent, its blatant unconcern for the margins of error contained within it, its careful decontextualization. Think of the need to get people to be vaccinated. The end justifies the means. Lenin agreed. If the ends do not justify the means, he said, what do?

I believe in the importance of clean water, clean air, reforestation, sustainable agriculture, and sound conservationist practices. Let's work on those, without recourse to doomsday dystopias and repeated “the end is near” pronouncements.

The Sturm und Drang eschatology of the environmentalist movement contributes to further disillusionment with the notion that science is a dull but (asymptotically) objective discipline.

No word yet from smijer, who promised a reply to my last post on this topic, either here or at his place. Just another swipe at “Global Warming Skepticism.” Of course. But the public response of the scientific community to its own dirty laundry in this affair has been abysmal. Furthermore, it’s time that climate science ween itself from the tendency of systematic over-reach in terms of prediction, and the willingness to allow data and models to be treated on a par.

UPDATE: For further discussion and background, I recommend Jim Manzi’s piece (and note comment thread). 

SBL-New Orleans was a chance to catch up with scholarship here and there, but more significantly, to spend time with old friends and make new ones. My time was evenly divided between SBL and New Orleans proper. It was easy to do, since I have a dear friend, Walter Baer, who lives in the French Quarter. My daughter Betta and I were his special guests, and we saw and understood much more, because Walter is the quintessential Cicero, a walking encyclopedia of history and lore. So, when I wasn’t at the Sheraton or the Marriott on Canal Street, I was walking the French Quarter, attending the rededication of an Episcopalian parish in the Ninth Ward, or eating at one of NOLA’s fine restaurants.

The bookends of the meeting were particularly memorable. On Friday evening, things got off to a great start with a steering committee dinner at the Daisy Bistro. Colin Toffelmire has a report here. More than one member of the SBL Biblical Hebrew Poetry Section taskforce rather liked the Sicilian lemon grappa I brought along – I won’t mention any names. More to the point, the food, atmosphere, and company were excellent. It wasn’t too loud; it wasn’t too dark; we had plenty of time.

In conclusion, on Monday evening, Brandon Wason and I of biblioblogs.com, enjoyed hosting an evening of great food, (beer), camaraderie, and scholarship at the Deutsches Haus, a secular (in the old-fashioned sense of “secular” – explained to us by Raymond van Leeuwen during the evening in another context) benevolent institution founded by German speaking Protestants, Jews, and Catholics with historical roots going back 150 years. Karyn Traphagen has a first report here. Expect more posts on that event from various bloggers – it was indeed a splendid occasion.

What about the papers? What about the books and software? I’ll get to those in later posts. In the meantime, Ros Clarke has a brief summary of one of the Biblical Hebrew Poetry sessions here. 

Early in November people from several area churches gathered at Trinity for a joint business meeting. The best part was hearing about the upswing in the life of many area congregations. Members of North Fond du Lac, Eden-Tabor, Oakfield, and our own Trinity spoke highly of changes in progress. The fellowship was sweet. At the same time, our missions committee, which served a scrumptious meal, met and exceeded its fundraising goals through the free-will offering. Very nice.

But are we doing enough as a church to reach out to the community and to meet the needs of our membership? Am I doing enough as a pastor? No, I am not.

In particular, I am sure that there are unmet pastoral needs that I don’t know about. Even when I do know about them, they are often beyond my ability to meet unless I am asked to do so. I can’t step into family crises unless asked. When a life change is proving to be a challenge, a health crisis or the loss of a loved one, from the outside, I cannot always figure out when the right time to visit is, or whether a visit is desired.

I have tried reading people’s minds before, but I am not that good at it. I greatly appreciate the fact that I am able to visit the entire membership thanks to the persistent invitational calling of x and y. This project has been going on for 12 months, and as long as y and x are up to making the arrangements, I will continue to make the rounds. I also depend on people like a, b, and c who let me know when they think someone who has not asked for a visit secretly hopes for one.

Speaking for myself, I secretly hope that my doctor will start making house calls, like doctors used to do. Furthermore, I want him to call me and make the arrangements, without a request on my part. I don’t want to call him.

But it’s not going to happen.

At Trinity, we try hard to meet the spiritual and pastoral needs, not just of the membership, but of anyone who asks. This is my advice: if you would like a visit, if you would like to share and pray for any reason, do what you would do if you wanted to see your doctor, dentist, or massage therapist (I don’t do massages).

Call the church office and ask, “Can I set up an appointment to speak with Pastor John? I want to tell him what a blankety-blank he is.” Or: “It’s about time he came over.” Or: “I have some homemade cookies I want to share with him.”

“Yes,” will be the answer, “when would you like that to happen?” “Yes,” will be the answer. Always.

It’s like music and music theory. Everyone likes to listen to music. Few learn to read music. Fewer still learn enough about music to understand compositional technique.

The situation is exacerbated in the field of ancient Hebrew poetry by widespread disillusionment with past attempts to understand its ground rules. In the absence of meter in the sense of tightly controlled sequences of iambic feet like those of traditional English verse and Greek and Latin verse before that, many scholars seem to have concluded that ancient Hebrew verse lacks prosodic regularities worth describing with care.

The dicta of Kugel, O’Connor, and Pardee in particular have had a chilling effect on those who might otherwise be inclined to investigate the subject matter. All three reject the notion that ancient Hebrew verse is metrical in a strict sense. In one sense, this is nothing more than a terminological dispute of the kind scholars enjoy to no end.[1] One would think that the measured-out quality of ancient Hebrew verse would be obvious to all, and despite the huffing and puffing, it probably is. On the other hand, there is a sense that if ancient Hebrew verse conforms to precise organizing principles, they have yet to be recovered. The jury is still out.

The current antipathy of most scholars of the Hebrew Bible to poetry theory is curious. Poetry typically involves the continuous correspondence of successive segments which come in certain shapes and sizes, phonologically speaking, and not others. According to specific expectations, prosodic phrases form packets referred to as lines, and groups of lines form chunks. The phrases, lines, and line-groups provide a mold into which a poet pours semantic content. In the case of ancient Hebrew verse, it really is not difficult to see that it is structured in terms of prosodic frames. The study of prosodic regularities in ancient Hebrew verse ought therefore to be of considerable interest.

In the course of evoking her grandfather for posterity, the American poet Robert Frost, Lesley Lee Francis remembers that according to him, “certain poems, like haphazard knowledge, stick to you like burrs in the field” (here). That is a fitting description of Psalms 104 and 137; Isaiah 1:2-20; 5:1-7, and 40:1-11; Job 3 and 28; and other great poems of the Bible.

But the statement of Robert Frost describes what poetry does, not what it is. What is poetry? Frost makes two suggestions:

...I have a tune [when writing poetry], but it's a tune of the blend of these two things [meter and rhythm]. Something rises--it's neither one of those things. It's neither the meter nor the rhythm; it's a tune arising from the stress on those--same as your fingers on the strings, you know. The twang!

. . . I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.[2] 

Meter and rhythm are two different things. Frost understood that, and knew that the best poetry fights against both even as it falls under their sway. It isn’t difficult to sense both meter and rhythm at work in his poetry. 

An example may illustrate. The meter of Frost’s A Peck of Gold is describable in terms of twice-repeated duple counts of strong stresses across the components of its units. Variation in the shapes and sizes of the units dominated by a single strong stress determine its ever-changing rhythm. I have slightly altered the formatting of the original. Differences in the use of blank spacing define stress units, half-lines, lines, couplets, and quatrains. 

A Peck of Gold 

Dust always  blowing    about  the town,
Except when  sea-fog    laid it  down,

And I  was one    of the children  told
Some  of the blowing    dust  was gold. 

All  the dust    the wind  blew high
Appeared  like god    in the sunset  sky,

But I  was one    of the children  told
Some  of the dust    was really  gold.

Such  was life    in the Golden  Gate:
Gold dusted  all    we drank  and ate,

And I  was one    of the children  told,
‘We all  must eat    our peck  of gold.’

The poem is prosodically regular. Twice-repeated duple counts of strong stresses characterize each line. Enjambment is universal across the half-lines that make up a line, in coincidence, usually, with natural syntactic breaks. Enjambment is frequent across the lines that make up a couplet. 

Sequences of feet of fixed type and length as found in some traditional forms of verse are not a continuously operating principle of organization in Frost’s poetry. But the sequences that occur are far from haphazard. The opening line of each quatrain begins with a strong-stressed first syllable. The last line of the last quatrain, on the other hand, is purely iambic. 

Meter, rhythm, and rhyme, each plain to the ear, contribute to the sound orchestration of A Peck of Gold. Meter and rhyme occur at fixed intervals. Rhythm does not. Its variability de-monotonizes the acoustic effect of the whole. 

Research I have carried out supports the conclusion that ancient Hebrew verse possesses meter in the same sense that Frost’s poetry does. Duple and triple counts of strong stresses follow one another and make up the parts of a line. Lines occur in couplets and triplets. Enjambment, as O’Connor and Dobbs-Allsopp have demonstrated, is another common feature of ancient Hebrew verse. 

The meter of ancient Hebrew verse, I submit, is just as regular as that of Frost’s verse. An example in translation is given below. It is formatted after the same fashion adopted for A Peck of Gold above, except that each part-line or verset is assigned a line of its own. 

Hear  o heavens,

give ear  o earth!

Yahweh  has spoken.

Sons  I reared  and raised,

and they  rebelled  against me.

An ox  knows  its owner,

an ass  its master’s  pen;

Israel  does not  know,

my people  do not  consider.

O  errant  nation,

iniquity  laden  people,

Brood  of evildoers,

miscreant  sons,

Who abandoned  Yahweh,

despised  Israel’s  Holy One,

turned  back!

Where  shall one strike you  again?

You go on  turning away!

The whole  head is injured,

the whole  heart  sick;

From sole of foot  to head,

no  soundness  in it:

Sore  and gash,

raw  wound,

Not  drained,

not  dressed,
not  softened  with oil.                                                (Isaiah 1:2-6)[3]

Enough of English. In my next post, the poetic structure of Isa 1:2-6 in Hebrew receives attention.

[1] For an overview of the debate, see A History of Modern Research. For full references to Kugel, O’Connor, and Pardee’s contributions, see Annotated Bibliography.

[2] Taken from “Conversations on the Craft of Poetry,” Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays (New York: The Library of America, 1995) 856-57. Hat tip to the blogger who posts about Frost here. The use and contents of the material in brackets I pick up from her.

[3] I discuss this passage at length in “The Poetic Structure of Isaiah 1:2-20: A Programmatic Essay.” Go here.

Concepts like meter, rhythm, and the distinction between the two as clarified by Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky are not difficult to teach if examples are given first from native language verse and then from Hebrew, the ultimate goal. When it comes to parallelism, the chief trope of ancient Hebrew poetry, it helps to introduce the phenomenon of “recurrence” according to the adaptation of the model of Roman Jakobson by biblical scholar P. J. Nel. The notion of semantic transfers via metaphorical frames of reference is also of great utility. The theory of metaphor advanced by Benjamin Harshav is a cogent point of departure for the purpose of identifying metaphorical planes in Hebrew poetry.

To start things off, here are some straightforward definitions of key terms. 

Poetry is a genre of verbal art in which highly patterned and highly figured language predominates. The patterns which qualify as “poetic” in a given language and time are established by convention. As far as ancient Hebrew poetry is concerned, the dominant patterns consist of co-occurring structures of parallelisms woven into the fabric of the text at the phonological, morphological, syntactic, prosodic, and semantic levels. 

A poem is a sustained example of verbal art of the genre defined above. 

“Verse is language in lines,” as Charles Hartman stated.[1] More precisely, as Albert Willem de Groot put it, “Continuous correspondence of successive segments, called ‘lines,’ is the only constant feature which distinguishes verse from prose.”[2] As far as verse in ancient Hebrew is concerned, the units of measurement which most clearly correspond to each other on a continuous basis are the prosodic word, the verset, the line, and the strophe. These terms are defined in relationship to one another in the general rule, which I introduce below. 

Prose may be defined as a genre of verbal art in which the patterned and figured language conventional in poetry does not predominate. 

As far as ancient Hebrew prose genres are concerned, legal, rhetorical, and narrative prose often possesses a cadence that approximates the division of ancient Hebrew poetry into clusters of two to three prosodic words. But consistency is not observable. Clusters of four prosodic words 1+3, 3+1, and 1+2+1 in configuration occur with some frequency. Furthermore, the high density of semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological parallelisms across units of verset, line, and strophe length characteristic of ancient Hebrew poetry is not the norm in ancient Hebrew prose. Further study is required, but, if my working hypothesis is on the right track, the distinction between prose and poetry in ancient Hebrew literature is, generally speaking, very clear-cut. 

What is that hypothesis? It has two parts.

There is a general rule. In ancient Hebrew, a prosodic hierarchy of “twos and threes” structures a poem. Two to three prosodic words or stress units form a verset, two to three versets a line, two to three lines a strophe, two to three strophes a stanza, and two to three stanzas a poem or section thereof.

There is also a length rule: a poem, if it contains more than 10 lines, typically consists of 12, 18, 22, 28, or 36 lines, or combinations thereof. Among the Psalms, 14 lines is also a common length. 

The terms meter and rhythm are often conflated. An excellent definition of meter was given by John Lotz: “the numerical regulation of certain properties of the linguistic form.”[3] 

The problem is that language in general possesses meter in this sense. At the highest level of abstraction, all one can say is that verse generally adheres to a more strictly defined set of regularities than do other forms of speech and literature in a given language. As a practical matter, however, the problem rarely obtains. Verse is characterized by specific and describable stylizations of the more general metrical properties observable in speech and literature within a given language and time frame. The stylizations which qualify as “verse” are established by convention. We normally reserve the term “meter” for the metrical properties of verse.

In the view of many, ancient Hebrew poetry is describable in terms of counts of strong stresses across the components of its units. The research carried out in connect with this project supports this view. The distinctions of Viktor Zhirmunsky are worth keeping in mind: 

            Pure tonic verse is based on a count of the stressed syllables; the number of unstressed syllables is a variable quantity . . . When attention is focused on the stressed syllables, groups of unstressed syllables – even though they contain varying numbers of syllables – may be perceived as equivalent to each other.

            Of course, the number of unstressed syllables between stresses is of essential importance in shaping the rhythm of individual lines or of the poem as a whole: since, however, such syllables form no part of the compositional structure, they belong to the area of rhythm, not meter.[4] 

Put another way, feet in the sense of classical prosody exist in ancient Hebrew poetry but are not metrical. The patterns or lack of them in which they co-occur belong to the dimension of rhythm. 

Another key term is prosody. As I use the term, all language is subject to prosodic constraints at various levels. Syllables, feet, words, phrases, and utterances in a given language come in certain shapes and sizes, phonologically speaking, and not others. In poetry, language-specific constraints are stylized according to convention.

In my view, the components of the line in ancient Hebrew verse for which it is essential to have a working definition are two.

In all languages and all poetries, below the word level, syllables are isolable counting units. A syllable is a sequence of segments grouped around an obligatory nucleus, ordinarily a vowel. An initial margin, if any, is referred to as the onset; the remainder of the syllable, as the rhyme, composed of the nucleus or peak and optionally, a final margin, known as the coda. Ordinarily, margins are consonants. But there is no evidence for the view that ancient Hebrew verse was regulated in the sense of requiring a set number of syllable per line and half-line. On the other hand, there is evidence for the view that particular varieties of ancient Hebrew verse conformed to specific expectations in terms of line length and half-line length. The expectations are expressible in terms of a syllable recipe the exact details of which will not detain us here.

In accord with a venerable tradition of analysis in Old Testament studies, it seems to me that the minimal counting unit in ancient Hebrew poetry for general purposes is the prosodic word. A prosodic word is the domain of word stress. In many languages, and in Hebrew, an orthographic word is composed of a lexical word which may be preceded or followed by a short function word the whole of which is dominated by a single main stress. An orthographically distinct function word and the lexical word to which it is attached taken together constitute a prosodic word. Words without word stress are known as pro- and enclitics. Another term used for a prosodic word is a stress unit.

If this kind of analysis is relevant to ancient Hebrew verse, and I think it is, the regularities which show up on further analysis can be elegantly expressed. As already proposed, two to three prosodic words form a verset, two to three versets a line, two to three lines a strophe, two to three strophes a stanza, and two to three stanzas a poem or section thereof. The application of this text model to the corpus of poetry in the Hebrew Bible leads to results that vary to a limited but not insignificant extent from those arrived at by the more intuitive, less formal text models that underlie the lineation of the corpus to be found in the general run of scholarly commentaries and recent translations.

To be clear, the first goal of the study of ancient Hebrew verse is not that of reaching total agreement about the ground rules of lineation in the corpus. The first goal is simply to move away from the more intuitive approaches to lineation that continue to dominate the field, approaches that consciously or unconsciously posit text models so loose that a distinction between poetry and prose and between types of poetry become impossible. It is time to put forward testable text models of ancient Hebrew poetry. Whether or not the text model you adopt is identical to mine is not the point. The point is, from the point of the data-based study of ancient Hebrew verse, a testable working hypothesis is an essential heuristic tool if progress of any kind is to be made.

For a full glossary and full introduction to the text model of ancient Hebrew verse I propose, I direct the reader to the post entitled How Ancient Hebrew Poetry Works.

To be continued.

[1] Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980) 11; cited by Walter T. W. Cloete, Versification and Syntax in Jeremiah 2-25: Syntactical Constraints in Hebrew Colometry (SBLDS 117; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) 5.

[2] Albert Willem de Groot, “The Description of a Poem,” in Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, Cambridge, Mass., August 27-31, 1962 (ed. Horace G. Lunt; The Hague: Mouton, 1964) 294-300, 299; cited by W. T. W. Cloete, Versification, 5.

[3] John Lotz, “Elements of Versification,” in Versification: Major Language Types (ed. William K. Wimsatt; New York: Modern Language Association / New York Univ. Press, 1972) 1-21; 2; cited by M. O’Connor, Hebrew Verse Structure (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1980) 67; and Cloete, Versification, 11.

[4] Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky, Introduction to Metrics: The Theory of Verse (tr. and ed. C.E. Brown; introd. Edward Stankiewicz and Walter N. Vickery; The Hague: Mouton, 1966) 171; cited Cloete, Versification, 9.

A restaurant, the Daisy Bistro, is very special, but there are two inconveniences. It is 15 minutes away by vehicle from the Sheraton Hotel on Canal St. On the other hand, it’s worth the extra cost of a cab. Ask the cabbie to drive past the cemeteries not far from the Bistro, to go off the main drag here and there. Might as well take in the landscape a bit. The Daisy is not far from Tulane U. It is best to call ahead and make reservations (number in link below). If you do that in the early afternoon, Anton himself, the chief cook and owner, may well take your reservation.

The other inconvenience is that the restaurant does not open until 6. But that’s already early by New Orleans standards. Some of the best places do not open until 7.

Here's the location:

http://bistrodaisynola.com/

Here's the menu:

http://bistrodaisynola.com/menu.html

After that, or for another kind of adventure, one might try out the famous Neutral Grounds Coffeehouse five minutes away from the bistro. 

http://www.neutralground.org/

Come on. How often do you get to go to NOLA? Why not nose around a bit? I do have SBL friends who are planning to go to some hookah bar for an evening, but I'm making no suggestions along that line.  

(1) The best online edition of the Hebrew Bible is on offer from the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. It is a faithful reproduction of Codex Leningradensis, although it corrects miniscule errors of the naqdan: compare ריח in Song of Songs 7:9 in BHQ vs. the Westminster electronic edition and BHL. Its usefulness is enhanced because one can strip the Masoretic text of accents and vowels. It is important to be able to read biblical Hebrew without vowels. If you can read Hebrew without vowels, that’s because you know the language. If you can’t, that’s because you don’t. An intermediate to advanced student of ancient Hebrew can learn to read the biblical text without vowels within a short amount of time and with a minimum of error.

(2) How so? Starting with unpointed text, do your best to read it properly. Then check your work against audio recordings of the text of the Hebrew Bible. The best set I know of contains the reading of Avraham Shmuelof and is divided into chapters courtesy of Gary Martin here. Practice makes perfect.

(3) The standard reference grammar of biblical Hebrew, Gesenius-Kautzsch-Cowley, is available online, searchable in wikisource. Everything in the volume, including all the paradigms, is cut-and-pastable. Let’s say you are wondering if the grammar says anything about תְּלָאָה‎, a noun whose pattern you wish to investigate. Or perhaps you wish to see each time the grammar references a particular verse, say Ps 119:14. Stick Kautzsch-Cowley and the item of interest into the Google search engine, and voilà, a list is yours. Check it out.

(4) Dictionaries. Stick a Hebrew word into this search engine, milon.morfix, and see what comes up. For best results, insert the “dictionary” form. Otherwise, you might not get anything appropriate back. The nice thing about this search engine is that lexemes pop up vocalized. (5) This search engine, courtesy of Babylon.com, is helpful because of its thesaurus and “image” functions. The problem with it is that not all biblical Hebrew vocabulary is covered. Milon.morfix is more complete based on a spot check.

So far as I know, a searchable online edition of Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) is not available. UPDATE: I take that back – for the scoop on a sort of searchable online edition, courtesy of David Reimer, go here.

But then, those who haven’t already need to break down and purchase a suite of electronic resources from Logos Bible Software or another provider. The research advantages are considerable.  

Given that the universe is this enormous thing that has no need of humankind, what is man, here one day and gone the next, that he has a place of honor in it? It is widely acknowledged that we live in a fine-tuned universe, and in our environment, conditions for life and human life in particular are ideal. This is cause for praise and grounds for seeking the Creator’s continued intervention. So Ps 144:3-5. 

Given that that the God of Israel bound himself to bless the nation through promises made to the nation’s forbears, given that he brought them out of Egypt, the house of bondage, given that he gave them knowledge of his ways by way of Moses on Sinai, now, what does the Lord your God ask but reverence, synchronization with his redemptive purposes, loyalty, and service? So Dt 10:12.

In medias res, in the middle of a story yet unfolding, a congruent response to the divine initiatives occasions a promise. So Ps 147:11. The God of Israel favors those who reverence him and wait for the manifestation of his unbreakable love. 

Is it possible to be a recipient of divine benevolence even if one expects nothing at all, good or bad, from a future we cannot control? By all means. But how wonderful it is to be expectant of divine providence. The language of expectation is primal language.

Series introduction here.

תפלה

מָה־אָדָם וַתֵּדָעֵהוּ               בֶּן־אֱנוֹשׁ וַתְּחַשְּׁבֵהוּ . . .

יְהוָה הַט־שָׁמֶיךָ וְתֵרֵד          גַּע בֶּהָרִים וְיֶעֱשָׁנוּ . . .

שְׁלַח יָדֶיךָ                         מִמָּרוֹם פְּצֵנִי

וְהַצִּילֵנִי מִמַּיִם רַבִּים             מִיַּד בְּנֵי נֵכָר

What is man, that you took note of him,
the son of man, that you took him into account? . . .

יהוה, bend your sky and come down,
touch the mountains, let them smoke! . . .

Extend your hands,                                   rescue me from on high,
pluck me from the mighty waters,            from the grip of foreigners. (Ps 144:3.5.7)

תורה

וְעַתָּה יִשְׂרָאֵל מָה יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ שֹׁאֵל מֵעִמָּךְ

כִּי אִם־לְיִרְאָה אֶת־יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ

לָלֶכֶת בְּכָל־דְּרָכָיו   וּלְאַהֲבָה אֹתוֹ

וְלַעֲבֹד אֶת־יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל־נַפְשֶׁךָ׃

Now, O Israel, what does יהוה your God ask of you,  
but to fear יהוה your God,
walk in his ways, and love him;

to serve יהוה your God with all your heart and with all your soul? (Deut 10:12)

דברים נחמים

רוֹצֶה יְהוָה אֶת־יְרֵאָיו

אֶת־הַמְיַחֲלִים לְחַסְדּוֹ

יהוה favors those who fear him,
those who wait for his steadfast love. (Ps 147:11)

Prov 3:11-12 lifts up the theme of the severe love of God. Ps 139:23-24 is the prayer of one who is overwhelmed by God's knowledge of his person, who welcomes God's testing of his thoughts nonetheless. Series introduction here.

תורה

מוּסַר יְהוָה   בְּנִי אַל־תִּמְאָס

וְאַל־תָּקֹץ בְּתוֹכַחְתּוֹ

The discipline of יהוה,
O my son do not reject;
do not abhor his reproof.

דברים נחמים

כִּי־אֶת אֲשֶׁר יֶאֱהַב   יְהוָה יוֹכִיחַ

וּכְאָב אֶת־בֵּן יִרְצֶה

For the one he loves
יהוה reproves,
like a father the son he favors.

תפלה

חָקְרֵנִי אֵל   וְדַע לְבָבִי

בְּחָנֵנִי וְדַע שַׂרְעַפָּי׃

וּרְאֵה אִם־דֶּרֶךְ־עֹצֶב בִּי

וּנְחֵנִי בְּדֶרֶךְ עוֹלָם׃

Search me, O God,
and take note of my heart,
probe me, take note of my thoughts.

Watch lest a path of hurt threaten me,
lead me in the way of the ages.

For a pdf of the above, with notes and exercises, go here.

תורה

יַחֵל יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶל־יְהוָה

יַחֵל יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶל־יְהוָה

מֵעַתָּה וְעַד־עוֹלָם

Wait, O Israel, for יהוה,
Wait, O Israel, for יהוה,
now and always.

דברים נחמים

כִּי־עִם־יְהוָה הַחֶסֶד

וְהַרְבֵּה עִמּוֹ פְדוּת׃

וְהוּא יִפְדֶּה אֶת־יִשְׂרָאֵל

מִכֹּל עֲוֺנֹתָיו

For with יהוה there is loyalty,
with him, redemption in abundance.

It is he who redeems Israel
from all his sins.

תפלה

חֶסֶד־וּמִשְׁפָּט אָשִׁירָה

לְךָ יְהוָה אֲזַמֵּרָה

אַשְׂכִּילָה בְּדֶרֶךְ תָּמִים

מָתַי תָּבוֹא אֵלָי

Of loyalty and justice I sing,
to you, O יהוה, I hymn!

I make my theme the way of integrity;
when will you come to me?

For a pdf of the above, plus grammatical notes and exercises, go here.

One set of restrictions are easy to justify. As Jon Shields points out (see this recent interview), the principle of respect for the personal moral choices of American citizens, the basis on which most controversial societal trends are metabolized, including abortion on demand, leads to respect for the position of pro-life citizens who are dead set against the possibility of their tax money being used to pay for abortions.

But what happens in politics is often determined by tiny cadres of activists. It’s too soon to say whether something like the Stupak-Pitts amendment will become law or not.

For some background blogging on my part, try:

Zwingli’s Doctrine of Inerrancy

The Classical Doctrine of Inerrancy

The Dangerous Doctrine of Inerrancy

Breathing New Life into the Doctrine of Inerrancy

תורה

אַל־תְּהִי חָכָם בְּעֵינֶיךָ

יְרָא אֶת־יְהוָה

וְסוּר מֵרָע

Do not be wise in your own eyes;
Fear יהוה,
and turn away from evil.

דברים נחמים

יֹשֵׁב בְּסֵתֶר עֶלְיוֹן

בְּצֵל שַׁדַּי יִתְלוֹנָן  …

בְּאֶבְרָתוֹ יָסֶךְ לָךְ

וְתַחַת־כְּנָפָיו תֶּחְסֶה

O you who dwell in the shelter of Elyon,
in the shadow of Shaddai lie at night . . .

he has covered you with his pinions;
you will find refuge under his wings.

תפלה

יְהוָה בִּרְצוֹנְךָ

הֶעֱמַדְתָּה לְהַרְרִי עֹז

הִסְתַּרְתָּ פָנֶיךָ

הָיִיתִי נִבְהָל׃

אֵלֶיךָ יְהוָה אֶקְרָא

וְאֶל־אֲדֹנָי אֶתְחַנָּן׃

יהוה, thanks to your favor,
you made me stand on an impregnable height.

You hid your face,
I was terrified.

To you, O יהוה, I cry,
from the Lord I implore grace.

For a pdf of the above, plus grammatical notes, exercises, and bibliography, go here.

It’s a beautiful concept, loosely based on Qoh (Ecclesiastes) 4:12, which teaches “the value of mutual aid against assault” (Fox 1999: 223). It is possible, as Menahem Haran suggested, that Qohelet split up a graded numerical proverb and inserted his own comments in the middle (Fox 1999: 223-224). On this understanding, Qoh 4:9a + 12c is the base text out of which 4:9-12 was built:

טוֹבִים הַשְּׁנַיִם מִן־הָאֶחָד

וְהַחוּט הַמְשֻׁלָּשׁ

לֹא בִמְהֵרָה יִנָּתֵק

Better two than one,
and a three-ply cord,
it will not quickly snap.

In the application, the chief helpers to the believer are three. They are a trio that sings in harmony across Miqra globally considered. They are, to use biblical expressions:

תּוֹרָה

דְּבָרִים נְחֻמִים

תְּפִלָּה

Instruction,
Comforting words,
Prayer.

Students of the Bible might benefit from honing their language skills on a trio of this kind a day. So I will post a trio a day. I will follow A Threefold Cord insofar as possible. However, where A Threefold Cord does so, I will not offer a trio from the Tanakh + New Testament or solely from the NT. The trio I propose consists of readings from the Tanakh/ OT alone. The translations, grammatical notes, and exercises are my own. A trio that included passages from a wider collection of writings, from the Talmud and Midrashim, or from the deuterocanonicals, the NT, and the Church Fathers, would be most welcome. I leave that to someone else to offer.

It would be ideal to be able to link to audio recordings of the specific passages in the original languages. Such is, however, beyond my technical expertise.

Bibliography

Michael V. Fox, A Time to Tear Down & A Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999)

Secondly, Alicia Florrick exemplifies a marriage ethos I know well from New England and the upper Midwest, deeply rooted in old WASP values, a crucible of suffering to be sure, but fibrous and strong. I keep expecting the series to revert to a Hollywood template, with people jumping in and out of each other’s beds with great aplomb. So far, that hasn’t happened.

Thirdly, Julianna Margulies in the role of Alicia Florrick shines.

Fourthly, I spent a half hour trying to find some intelligent comment on the series in the media. I couldn’t find any. TV critics are superficial schmucks. Quite a bit of TV series content, at least at the beginning of a series, is beyond the kind of people who review it for the media, who are mostly interested in glam and glitz. But I’m betting many people are watching this series, and thinking hard in the process.

Room must be made for other senses of the text, developed by other traditions, and historical criticism must learn to interact more creatively with those other traditions, neither surrendering to them nor demanding that they surrender to historical criticism.

Levenson is an advocate of the “dignity both of traditional interpretation and of modern criticism.”² Is it likely that the field of biblical studies will ever make progress in the direction he points?

No and yes.

No, because many biblical scholars consider it their duty to nudge their students in the direction of thinking and acting like nice, secular, liberal people, the de facto religion of the religiously uncommitted academic world. If their students are already nice, secularized, uncommitted people, a fundamentalist “other” is constructed as a punching bag, in the interests of producing lean, mean, fighting machines. Traditional interpretation of the Bible, except insofar as it can be construed to dovetail with the Enlightenment project, or be tarred as irrational, is not useful in this regimen. It is neglected or simply ignored.

Scholars of this stripe, and they are legion, tend to regard evangelicals, traditional Roman Catholics, and neo-conservative Jews – the kind of people behind magazines like Christianity Today, First Things and Commentary: just examples! - with a certain fear and loathing, as opponents of their sacred causes. Perhaps they are. One might expect that sort of thing in a pluralistic world.

It is of course also true that several categories of traditional Jews and Christians regard the historical study of the Bible and the commitment to recover the sense of the biblical text apart from their particular appropriation of it with suspicion and hostility.

But there are scholars who, regardless of their point of arrival in terms of cultural loyalties, see the existence of religious communities and traditions of interpretation of the Bible which have not simply caved in to modernity as a great positive in a world in which men read Maxim and women read Vogue.

On this understanding of the discipline of biblical studies, the goal is to point the way for non-believers, believers, and everyone in between to interact creatively with traditions of interpretation other than their own, neither surrendering to them nor demanding that they surrender to their tradition of interpretation.

¹ Jon D. Levenson, “Historical Criticism and the Fate of the Enlightenment Project,” in The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993) 106-126; 106. A version of the same essay with essentially the same content is available online here.

² Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993) xv.