VSO or SVO? That is the Question
Scholars involved in the close study of biblical Hebrew know that one of the ongoing debates is whether the biblical Hebrew clause is typically a Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) or Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order. This search provides the raw data for this question in the Pentateuch.
Here’s the VSO search in Andersen-Forbes (719 clauses in the Pentateuch):
Here’s the SVO search in Andersen-Forbes (272 clauses in the Pentateuch).
My next post will conduct the same search, but the results will be categorized by Pentateuchal source (J, E, P).
MSH @ May 26, 2008
Nice, but two ways you might improve on this are: 1) Provide counts for verbs of utterance. Since so much of the Hebrew Bible is reported speech, “wayyomer SBJ SPEECH” tends skew raw totals toward VSO. 2) Provide separate counts for suffixed and non-suffixed objects. It would be interesting to see how “named” objects, independent pronouns, and bound pronouns, (and null references, too, though I know A-F doesn’t mark things that aren’t there) perturb the counts. Just daydreaming …
Ivan: I’ll try some of those options.