Literary-Stylistic Metathesis in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

Abstract Biblical scholarship has concentrated almost exclusively on cases of unintentional metathesis, particularly as a tool of textual criticism. But metathesis is not only a result of accidents and mistakes; it can also be deliberately employed as a literary-stylistic device. Accordingly, this study addresses all three of these categories of metathesis in the biblical literature, but focuses particularly on Literary-stylistic metathesis that is an intentional form of metathesis, in which an author or editor has deliberately chosen to use two or more words that share the same characters in inverse order.