As the field of linguistics advances, it is vital that we bring those advances over to our study of the Hebrew Bible so that we can have the clearest and most accurate comprehension of the text as possible. Over the past twenty years, the fields of pragmatics and generative linguistics have shown that complementizers, like the English complementizer ‘that’ (I saw that the dog was fluffy; ‘that’ you are smart is very noticeable), are commonly used cross-linguistically in an insubordinate (not subordinate to anything) manner. A cross-linguistic analysis of the uses of insubordinate complementizers, when applied to the Biblical Hebrew complementizer כי (‘that’), makes sense of texts in the Hebrew Bible that presently make little sense and reduces the many proposed functions of כי down to two while also allowing translators to finally make sense of כי where no sense could previously be made.
This presentation details two such uses of complementizers that are not found in English (but are seen in Spanish, Italian, Icelandic, and other languages) and demonstrates how they have strong explanatory power for understanding the majority of the occurrences of כי in the Hebrew Bible, bringing sensible interpretations to texts that have long been difficult for interpreters. Although this presentation is based on the latest research on grammatical insubordination, it is designed to be accessible to non-linguists with a background in Biblical Hebrew, ensuring they can engage with the content and its relevance to the study of the language.