Peer-Reviewed Articles • Hebrew Language Resources 31

Hebrew Verbal Semantics

The study of Hebrew Syntax is producing a number of quality monographs. Waltke and O’Connor’s Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax provided a much needed update to GKC and Joüon’s work on syntax, as well as an excellent bibliography.56 Arnold and Choi provides a convenient and reliable outline to students of Waltke and O’Connor’s basic approach to Hebrew syntax.57 Muraoka’s update to Joüon’s grammar also provides a current bibliography to many of the debates that are continuing to be hashed out regarding both Hebrew tense and the Hebrew stem system.58 Van der Merwe has done an excellent update that incorporates some leading syntactical studies that Muraoka didn’t incorporate as systematically.59

The study of tense in the Hebrew verbal system has been hotly debated since the Middle Ages. McFall has chronicled this debate in his book-length survey.60 Providing a brief but excellent survey of medieval Hebrew grammarians’ understanding of the tenses, McFall’s book excels with the period between 1827 and the early 20 th century. Unfortunately, comparative approaches to the issue are not treated well.61 Though McFall ends his survey in the 1950s, the debate continues unabated. Three excellent scholars have entered the fray: Cohen, Joosten, and Cook. Each has presented well-researched and convincingly-argued contemporary theories on the tense system.62 Cohen’s study concentrates on late Biblical Hebrew.63 Joosten focuses on the prose literature and argues for the temporal quality of the verbal system, but he is careful to distinguish it from a tense system.64 Cook argues for a system that is primarily aspectual, but also has a place for temporal reference.65

Hebrew Lexicography

The study of Hebrew lexicography still stands in the shadow of Barr’s work of the 1960s, which heavily criticized the methodological foundations of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT).66 This critique precipitated a change in approach in the later volumes of TDNT, as well as the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT). Barr’s linguistic approach, however, was already dated when he wrote his book, and several advances in linguistics should be applied to the practice of lexicography. A notable recent approach to linguistics that is gaining influence is systemic functional grammar, as practiced notably by Halliday.67 An excellent guide for students is Walton’s “Principles for Productive Word Studies”; it is a clear and practical introduction to doing word studies in Hebrew.68

56 Bruce K. Waltke, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990).

57 Bill T. Arnold and John H Choi, A Guide to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

58 Joüon and Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew.

59 Van der Merwe, Naudé, and Kroeze, Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar.

60 Leslie McFall, The Enigma of the Hebrew Verbal System: Solutions from Ewald to the Present Day (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1982).

61 This weakness is filled somewhat by both Waltke, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, 343-377, and Cook (mentioned below).

62 Cook reviewed Joosten’s work in John A. Cook, “Putting Old Wine in New Wineskins: A New Synthesis of the Ver-bal System of Biblical Hebrew That Is Neither New nor a Coherent Synthesis,” Hebrew Studies 55 (2014): 379–88.

63 Ohad Cohen, The Verbal Tense System in Late Biblical Hebrew Prose (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013).

64 Jan Joosten, The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew: A New Synthesis Elaborated on the Basis of Classical Prose (Jerusalem: Simor Publishing, 2012).

65 John A. Cook, Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew (Wi-nona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012).

66 James Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament: With Additions and Corrections (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2001); James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

67 M. A. K. Halliday, ed., Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction, Open Linguistics Series (London ; New York: Continuum, 2004); Much of Halliday’s work has been in elucidation of syntax. For a theoretical foundation for his methodology, see M. A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3 rd ed. (London: Arnold, 2004).

68 John H. Walton, “Principles for Productive Word Study,” in New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, ed. Will em A VanGemeren, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), 161–71.