Exegetica Digita

Subject-Subject Complement Verbless Clause in Genesis and the Hebrew Bible

MSH — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:46:03 +0000

Verbless clauses in biblical Hebrew come in several syntactical varieties. One such example are clauses where one finds a subject and subject complement juxtaposed together with no stated verbal element. The search for this syntactical pattern appears below (restricted to Genesis; 243 occurrences). I’ve restricted the search somewhat by requiring that the first part of the verbless clause (subject or subject complement, depending on the word order) must be the first child of the parent node (CL = clause) and there can be no other clause immediate constituent between the two search items. You can download this search HERE, and a search for this pattern through the whole Hebrew Bible HERE. If you have Libronix, put the search in My Documents>Libronix DLS> SyntaxQueries to run it yourself in a syntax search.

Technorati Tags: andersen-forbes, Hebrew OT Syntax, verbless clause

Finding all the Geminate Verbs in the OT

MSH — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:46:20 +0000

Here’s an interesting post on this topic. Apparently, this is a search that can’t be done in most commercial software packages since it requires using something called “regular expressions.” It isn’t syntax, but it’s cool.

Technorati Tags: geminate, Hebrew, verbs

Wayyiqtol Sequences with Disjunctive X-Qatal

MSH — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:18:40 +0000

Here’s an example of a particular sequence that illustrates how a syntactical database can assist scholars looking for this kind of discourse pattern. The search below asks, “Where in the Hebrew Bible will I find three consecutive wayyiqtol clauses [no expressed subject] followed by a waw conjunction + expressed subject [noun] + qatal that disrupts the wayyiqtol sequence?”

There are 211 instances of this pattern in the Hebrew Bible. If you have Libronix 3.0 you can download the search and run it yourself. Put the search file in My Documents/Libronix DLS/SyntaxQueries.

Technorati Tags: andersen-forbes, Hebrew OT Syntax, syntax, waw-X-qatal, wayyiqtol

Finding an Accusative Subject and Accusative Direct Object of the Same Infinitive in the Greek New Testament

MSH — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:42:45 +0000

This is a wonderful search for illustrating how something as powerful as morphological searching in the Greek New Testament is dramatically inferior to searching the Greek NT with a syntactically-tagged database.

Those who have Greek will know that the subject of an infinitive is in the accusative case, not the nominative, as is the normal case circumstance. Without a syntax database, you would have to search for a noun or pronoun in the accusative case in the same verse as an infinitive. You can’t ask that the accusative noun or pronoun be the subject since that kind of tag only exists in a syntax database. Your results would be a majority of verses in the Greek NT, since infinitives and accusative case nouns and pronouns are abundant. To make matters worse, what if you also wanted to find all the places where the same infinitive ALSO had an object in the accusative case! It’s a hopeless search without a syntax database.

But, since there is such a thing, here’s the search:

And here is the first page of the results, in Greek and English (26 results):

If you have Libronix, you can download the search and put it in My Documents/Libronix DLS / SyntaxQueries to run it yourself.

Technorati Tags: accusative, Greek NT Syntax, Greek syntax, infinitive, NT greek grammar, NT Greek syntax

Tagging the New Testament for Meta-Comments

MSH — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:45:30 +0000

Here’s a brief explanation / illustration of a New Testament database markup for meta-comments.

Technorati Tags: new testament greek discourse, NT Greek Discourse

YHWH-Elohim as Subject of a Clause

MSH — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 06:20:25 +0000

I recently had occasion to search for all the occurrences where the divine name YHWH is couple with the noun elohim (absolute or construct). I thought I’d tweak that search a bit for the blog. Below are four searches, complete with links to download the syntax query file for Libronix users. I only have the image of the search for the first one, since the others are the same, only with source-critical tags added.

Search 1: All instances where YHWH-Elohim is the subject of a clause (378 occurrences); download search.

Search 2: All instances where YHWH-Elohim is the subject of a clause in J (20 occurrences); download search

Search 3: All instances where YHWH-Elohim is the subject of a clause in E (22 occurrences); download search

Search 4: All instances where YHWH-Elohim is the subject of a clause in P (14 occurrences); download search

Technorati Tags: andersen-forbes, Hebrew OT Syntax, syntax

Discourse Grammar vs. Discourse Analysis

MSH — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:59:19 +0000

Over at the Logos blog there is an interesting exchange on the subjectivity / objectivity of the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament.

Technorati Tags: new testament greek discourse, NT Greek Discourse, NT greek grammar

New Greek NT Discourse Articles

MSH — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:37:58 +0000

From over on the Logos blog:

SteveRunge’s two recent publications:

The first was published in April in the Review of Biblical Literature (RBL). The second appeared in the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Linguistics Institute of Ancient and Biblical Greek (JLIABG).

Technorati Tags: Greek NT Syntax, new testament greek discourse, NT Greek Discourse, NT greek grammar, NT Greek syntax

VSO or SVO? That is the Question

MSH — Tue, 27 May 2008 06:26:18 +0000

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).

Technorati Tags: Hebrew OT Syntax, Hebrew OT Syntax, SVO, VSO

“Come Near to” the LORD

MSH — Fri, 23 May 2008 23:02:11 +0000

I was working on an article a couple days ago and had to find out how many times the Hebrew verbקרב (”to draw near, approach; Hiphil - to bring”) was used in legal or ritual contexts that had to do with the Lord or the presence of the Lord. This verb lemma is common, occurring 280 times according to Westminster’s BHS 4.2. I didn’t feel like spending hours wading through the 280 occurrences to try to discern the context, so I turned to the Andersen-Forbes syntactical database. I constructed the query below, which searched for all occurrences of the lemma in clauses where there is also a movement toward a deity (as in “drew near to . . .” or “brought to . . .”). The query produced 23 results. Here is the search and some of the results.

If you have Libronix, you can download the syntax search and put it in My Documents/Libronix DLS/SyntaxQueries.

Technorati Tags: Hebrew OT Syntax, syntax