There are moments when the biblical writer will arrest the reader’s attention by featuring literary closural devices in the narrative. By these devices, the narrator signals much more than a plot climax that leads to a reader’s sense of “closure” in the narrative unit. Through closural devices, the author highlights critical actions of the biblical … Read more
From the Second Temple period to the end of the first Christian millennium, the text of the Hebrew Bible was studied and preserved in two major centres of Jewish scholarship: Tiberias and Iraq (Bavel). The text-forms preserved in these centres differ one from the other in many hundreds of loci. Moreover, each centre developed its … Read more
Qatal (perfect) verbs tend to refer to past time events. Some have argued that there are exceptions, however. This paper examines all the possible non-past qatal occurrences in Zechariah, and classifies them into three categories—timeless present/generic (2x), prophetic perfect (5x), and performative (26x), including the so-called messenger formula (“thus says/has said the LORD”). It then … Read more
This paper aims to elucidate the dynamic functions of the grammatical person shift in Hosea. Although linguistics has advanced the understanding of the person shift these years, the research of person shift in biblical Hebrew according to its discourse and rhetoric functions is still in need (few studies have probed this phenomenon as a subordinate … Read more
One aspect of Discourse Analysis is examining how the logical “sense” relations between clauses are built up to form the flow and meaning of a discourse. These relations are always present in coherent discourse, and they are, at times signaled by linguistic devices known as discourse markers. It has been proposed that at the clause … Read more
The poetic vividness of the book of Hosea is often attributed to the lexical and metaphorical characteristics of its language. However, its patterns of clause type usage also contribute to its unique semantic and pragmatic expressiveness. This study uses the theoretical perspective and analytical categories of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to explore the discourse-pragmatic meanings … Read more