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  • Putting Old Wine in New Wineskins:A New Synthesis of the Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew that is Neither new nor a Coherent Synthesis
  • John A. Cook
A review of The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew: A New Synthesis Elaborated on the Basis of Classical Prose. By Jan Joosten. Jerusalem Biblical Studies 10. Pp. viii + 513. Jerusalem: Simor, 2012. Cloth, $75.00.

Joosten’s work is a landmark publication and the capstone of his careerlong study of the Hebrew verbal system—an interest that extends back to the beginning of the 1980s, as he explains in the preface. Joosten’s analyses of 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 “usage” of each of the main verbal forms in turn—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.

Although Joosten’s book should represent a welcome addition to the field, I found the book to be disappointing because of the confused and problematic analyses in it. It is easy enough to quibble over analyses of individual passages in a book that treats so much data, as this one does. But what the reader needs to be aware of are two problems that are pervasive in the book and undermine its contribution to the field. First, the linguistic theory is [End Page 379] underdeveloped and outdated, leading to incomplete analyses, ad hoc explanations, and special pleading regarding the data. Second, the book shows repetitive, uneven treatments related to the lengthy development of the manuscript, so that the reader sometimes faces multiple and potentially contradictory explanations of the same phenomenon.

The origin of these two pervasive problems can be identified from Joosten’s opening comments. In the acknowledgements he states that his interest in the Hebrew verbal system began at the beginning of the 1980s, and he cites F. Rundgren (1921–2006) and J. Kuryłowicz (1895–1978) as the early and formative influences on his thinking (p. ii). It is evident that Joosten’s thinking in many regards has progressed little beyond these early formative influences, even while the linguistic discussion of tense-aspectmood has advanced markedly. He begins the body of the book by stating his intent “to keep theory and technical terminology to a minimum,” so as to fulfill his “practical” goal of providing exegetes with “a dependable analysis” of the Hebrew verbal forms (p. 1). It is laudable to keep theoretical discussion from hindering the reader’s understanding of the analysis of the data. But it is a problem if keeping theory “to a minimum” glosses over a faulty, underdeveloped, or outdated theory behind the analysis. Joosten does not provide a theory-uncluttered analysis as much as a theory-thin and outdated one. This is particularly evident in his vague and underdeveloped idea of future-modal/irrealis, in his idiosyncratic understanding of anterior qatal, which is indebted to Kuryłowicz’s outdated ideas, and in his inadequate accounting for the role of situation aspect and the semantic property of boundedness.

Joosten states in his acknowledgements that the first two chapters were “in near-final form” after a sabbatical in 2001–2002 (p. i). This...

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