Die Inkongruenz im Biblischen Hebräisch (review)

Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 174 Reviews There is an important difference between this book and other recent scholarship about biblical women, because while this is a book about women, there is no feminist analysis. This is a difficult book for a feminist scholar to review. It is obvious that the author values and respects women, including the women in the four stories he studies. Yet his lack of any grounding in feminist theory or perspective slants his analysis in such a way that he fails to deal with the women in any more than a traditional patriarchal perspective. The author makes a strong and credible case that these stories are part of a postexilic literature of protest against the Jewish establishment. And they do involve women as major characters. However, there is so much that is questionable about his arguments and so many unexamined assumptions about women and femininity that the book is greatly weakened thereby. Eleanor B. Amico University ofWisconsin-Oshkosh Oshkosh, WI 54901 DIE INKONGRUENZ 1M BIBLISCHEN HEBRAISCH. By Jaakov Levi. Pp. xvi + 243. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987. Paper, OM 48.00. This volume, presented in 1986 as an Inaugural-Dissertation at Heidelberg, concerns the topic of grammatical concord--or rather, the many instances of the lack, or apparent lack, thereof-in Biblical Hebrew. It is well known that the biblical text contains many passages in which plural forms are apparently construed with singular verbs or adjectives or resumed with singular pronouns, or feminine forms with masculine (or, less often, vice versa). Yet, as the author notes (p. 10), the issue of concord-also referred to as agreement or congruence-has not received a thorough treatment among the many grammatical studies of Biblical Hebrew. In this study, Levi reviews hundreds of examples of real or apparent lack of agreement and attempts-for the most part successfully-to classify them and to account for their occurrence. The book contains a brief introduction, followed by twenty-eight chapters that range in length from one page to thirty-nine, and a brief bibliography. There are no indices; a serious lack in the volume is an index of passages cited, which would greatly have improved the usefulness of the work. At the beginning of his introduction, Levi presents a definition of "Kongruenz": the agreement of syntactically connected words in gender, Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 175 Reviews number, and person; he also states that the subject of his study is formal "Inkongruenz" in Biblical Hebrew. He notes that lack of concord is often seen as linguistic error (error that leads scholars to "improve" the Hebrew text); in his view, however, incongruence is frequently normative; indeed, he suggests, the biblical writers flouted grammatical rules for the sake of variation, on which they laid great weight. Most of the introduction (pp. 17 )-though this never explicitly stated-is an enumeration of factors that may be conducive to real or apparent instances of incongruence: stylistic variation of grammatical forms, metonymy, and metaphor; precedence of the logical over the grammatical subject; impersonal expressions; textual errors; and (rarely, apparently, since it is not referred to again) loan translation. These abstract factors play little role in the discussion of actual examples that comprise the succeeding chapters. The end of the introduction reviews examples of variation in concord in otherwise identical biblical phrases; it also outlines very briefly the treatment of instances of biblical incongruence by rabbinic writers, the ancient versions, the masorah, medieval commentators , and modem scholars. (See now also B. Waltke and M. O'Connor, Biblical Hebrew Syntax, 1990, e.g., §§6.6, 14.2.) What is missing here is a definition of what actually constitutes incongruence . Levi's implicit definition seems to be anything that does not agree, or is not construed, as he expects it to be. For example, at the beginning of chap. 2, on numerals, he states that with numbers from 11 to 99 the counted item frequently appears in the singular, "und somit entsteht Inkongruenz." (Curiously, the fact that the numbers from 3 to 10 may also be construed with either singular or plural nouns is not noted.) It is not clear, however, why these should be labelled cases of lack of concord...