Putting Old Wine in New Wineskins: A New Synthesis of the Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew that is Neither new nor a Coherent Synthesis

Abstract

the Hebrew verbal forms, scattered in various journal articles and book chapters, appear together here in a work whose scope is ambitious. In the first four chapters, he discusses the basics of the inventory of forms and their semantic and text-linguistic functions (chap. 1), he provides an overview of the system through an examination of the oppositions among the verbal forms (chap. 2), he explores meaning variation for the verbal forms due to interactions with lexical semantics, adverbial modification, and similar syntactic configurations (chap. 3), and he treats inter-clausal relationships among verbal forms (chap. 4). At this point he returns in detail to the the wayyiqtol, qatal, predicative participle, yiqtol and weqatal, and the volitives, respectively (chaps. 5 9). The final three chapters he devotes to text-linguistic perspectives on the verbal forms (chap. 10), changes to the system in late Biblical Hebrew (in contrast to the focus of his work on the Classical Biblical Hebrew corpus; chap. 11), and the function of the verbal forms in poetry (chap. 12). In the back of the book are a bibliography, index of Scripture references, and a detailed table of contents, which presumably serves in lieu of a topical index.