Genesis 1-11: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text

Preface

PREFACE This handbook is going to look a little strange to students of the biblical text. The vocabulary and concepts it uses to explain Genesis 1–11 will be challenging in so far as they represent a non-traditional linguistic framework, an approach called functional grammar. But years of using this approach with my students at both Hope College and Western Theological Seminary have convinced me that it does make sense. I want to take this opportunity to thank them for their patience as I worked it out on them. How did I come to this functional approach? It was a rather lengthy journey. I was trained in classical Hebrew grammar at Calvin Theological Seminary, where Lambdin was (and still is) used. I had a fine teacher, later mentor and friend, in Dr. David Engelhard. I went on to graduate training in ancient near eastern languages and literatures, eventually earning a doctorate after concentrating on the northwest semitic languages. Among my teachers I am proud I can reckon Prof Franz Rosenthal, who taught me Syriac and comparative grammar. No more rigorous scholar and teacher could ever be had, a master of semitic linguistics. When it came time to formulate a dissertation topic, I decided to try to make sense out of the syntax of particle ‫י‬ ִ ‫ּכ‬ in biblical Hebrew and Ugaritic. This is a word that has been variously translated if, then, when, although, because, and increasingly by indeed. I had been reading texts and commentaries for years by then, and it seemed to me that the treatment of certain high frequency words, and this one in particular, was often impressionistic and arbitrary. So I decided to xi see if the linguistic and textual environment of ‫י‬ ִ ‫ּכ‬ might bring some controls to how we understand it. Ever since, I have been interested in linguistic structures at the clause level and higher. The problem though, it seemed to me, was that the conceptual toolbox of traditional grammar lacked the needed instruments to disassemble the text at that level. The traditional formal approach excels at verb and noun paradigms. But it falls short when it comes to explaining how words come together to form coherent texts. Along with others in the field, I have been exploring what has come to be called discourse analysis of the biblical text. There have been some useful efforts at combining discourse notions with traditional formal grammar. Notable among them is the topical grammar of Christo van der Merwe, et al. A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar (1999) and the teaching grammar of Bryan M. Rocine, Learning Biblical Hebrew: A New Approach Using Discourse Analysis (2000). I have gone in a slightly different direction. For better or worse, I decided to wed myself to a new theoretical underpinning, and use it to work out a text level approach to the biblical text. So, I used the perspective of functional grammar to introduce certain textbased concepts to my Hebrew students. They started learning about such matters even as they learned the forms of the language. It is this approach that also forms the basis of book currently in your hands. You will learn more about the approach when you read the Introduction . And read it you probably should. Only if you work through the Introduction and refer to the Glossary throughout, will any of this make any sense at all. I chose to dedicate this book to my Hebrew students. Although they did not know it at the time, they were guinea pigs in a trial of the viability of this approach. Thank God they survived, and some have even prospered. I will be ever grateful to them for their efforts, and for giving me the opportunity to work things out in this new way. I would also like to thank Hope College for its generous support. Much of the work leading up to this handbook came by way of generxii Preface ous summer support administered under the Jacob E. Nyenhuis Faculty Development Grants program. I would like to thank Western Theological Seminary for inviting me to teach a full year’s worth of biblical Hebrew in their online distance learning degree program. I would also like to thank Dr. Dennis Tucker, associate professor of Christian Scriptures at George W. Truett Theological Seminary and general editor of the series, for inviting me to undertake this volume in the Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Bible series. I am very grateful...