Abstract
Weinrich's monograph Tempus: Besprochene und erzählte Welt (1964) had a tremendous influence on the study of Biblical Hebrew. Studies by Schneider, Talstra and Niccacci and others are strongly influenced by Weinrich. In the ETCBC database of the Hebrew Bible, initiated by Eep Talstra in the 1970s, some of Weinrich's insights have been integrated. Amidst hundreds of studies in general linguistics, why was it precisely this book that had such a great impact? How should we evaluate this impact? Are Weinrich's insights still useful or have they become outdated? In this article we describe the introduction of Weinrich's insights into Biblical studies and some developments that have taken place since then, both in general linguistics and in Biblical studies. We further describe and evaluate the classification of Biblical Hebrew text types which developed from these insights.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 140-155 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Vetus Testamentum |
| Volume | 70 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 20 Jan 2020 |
Funding
The assignment of text type labels is not only valuable from a theoretical linguistic perspective, as if merely acknowledging the importance of linguistic phenomena beyond sentence level. We have seen that it is also helpful to provide insight in the complex embedding structures of narrative and direct speech. Furthermore, it turned out be useful in the study of linguistic variation in the Hebrew Bible. In a research project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research ( NWO ), entitled “Does Syntactic Variation Reflect Language Change? Tracing Syntactic Diversity in Biblical Hebrew Texts” (2013-2017) researchers of the ETCBC investigated the distribution of syntactic phenomena over the Hebrew Bible. Text type was taken as one of the variables, besides text corpus and syntactic environment. This project showed the usefulness of the category of text type for accurately describing this distribution. Regarding the complexity of phrases, for example, there is a clear difference between alleged Early Biblical Hebrew texts and Late Biblical Hebrew. But this difference appears only in the narrative text type (N), not in direct speech (Q). At clause level, one can observe that for the various ways in which Biblical Hebrew expresses “to be”, such as the nominal clause or clauses with היה , N and Q differ considerably in the alleged early texts, but Q in the early texts show some agreement with N and Q of later texts. With respect to the use of the verb היה , N (of earlier texts) shows similarities with main clauses in contrast to subordinate clauses.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek |
Keywords
- Biblical Hebrew
- Digital humanities
- Harald Weinrich
- Language variation
- Text types
