Word-Order Variation in Biblical Hebrew Poetry: Differentiating Pragmatics and Poetics (review)

Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 322 Reviews This new edition of William’s Hebrew Syntax is a welcome contribution to Biblical Hebrew studies, and it is recommended as a teaching and a reference book for students and scholars. Tamar Zewi University of Haifa Haifa, Israel tzewi@univ.haifa.ac.il WORD-ORDER VARIATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREW POETRY: DIFFERENTIATING PRAGMATICS AND POETICS. By Nicholas P. Lunn. Pp. xxii + 373. Waynesboro, Ga.: Paternoster Press, 2006. Paper, $39.99. Lunn’s revised dissertation is an important contribution to the study of Biblical Hebrew poetry. He provides a concise and up-to-date survey of the conventional wisdom on Biblical Hebrew syntax, Biblical Hebrew poetry, and Lambrechtian information structure; he then employs this combined model as a filter on a select corpus of Biblical Hebrew poetry, yielding a subset of deviant or non-canonical cola for further study. He invokes “poetical defamiliarization” as an explanation of such variation, borrowing the concept from Russian formalist literary theory. His key finding that this non-canonicity is optional and free, yet constrained and licensed, establishes a ramifying research agenda, and is very welcome for this reason. The first section of the book is a series of concise summaries of conventional syntactic analysis of Biblical Hebrew (chap. 1), of Biblical Hebrew poetry and colometry (chap. 2), and information-structure theory (topic, focus, etc.) with special attention to the work of Lambrecht and its application to Biblical Hebrew (chap. 3). The second section then turns to a consideration of how to isolate and analyze poetic deviance within the framework as outlined. His comparison and contrast with other approaches can be enlightening. An instructive critique of R. Buth’s analysis of Psalm 51 (pp. 97–102) is worth carefully reviewing simply for the argumentation: clearly Buth’s position is in fact the null hypothesis (that is, there is no special “poetic” deviation from prose syntax). Lunn’s chapter 10 also provides extended critiques of other functionalist approaches. The latter suffer primarily from not adapting Lambrecht’s theory of focus; but I personally have a good deal of trouble with that particular approach to focus and its application to Biblical Hebrew, and so do not consider this a major fault. See further the seminal work of Robert Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 323 Reviews Holmstedt, who is highly critical of Lambrechtian theory and application, especially his study “Word Order in the Book of Proverbs” in Seeking Out the Wisdom of the Ancients: Essays Offered to Honor Michael V. Fox on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (ed. K. G. Friebel, D. R. Magary, R. L. Troxel; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005), pp. 135–154. The fundamental criticism of Lunn’s study is that the syntactic theory on which it is based has been shown to be descriptively and explanatorily inadequate . The possibility of an alternative non-VSO (verb-subject-object) approach is only mentioned in passing on the last page (p. 280). Such an alternative non-VSO syntax, tracing its roots back at least as far as P. Joüon’s 1923 Grammaire de l’hébreu biblique (unfortunately lost in Muraoka’s “translation”), and revived by A. Nicacci in his seminal paper, “A Neglected Point of Hebrew Syntax: Yiqtol and Position in the Sentence,” Liber Annuus 37 (1987): 7–19, was formalized within Government and Binding Theory in my 1995 doctoral thesis, “On the Placement and Interpretation of the Verb in Standard Biblical Hebrew Prose” (University of Toronto). The implications for information structure were highlighted there, and have subsequently been extended by R. Holmstedt in “Word Order and Information Structure in Ruth and Jonah: A Generative-Typological Analysis,” Journal of Semitic Studies (forthcoming). Appendix 2 of my dissertation considered the result of applying the general model as a filter on the four poems in the Samuel-Kings corpus (1 Sam 2:1–10, 2 Sam 1:19–27, 2 Sam 22:1–51, 2 Kgs 19:21–28). The conclusion was that the model could indeed handle poetic word order with few exceptions . Those exceptions conformed to an IP-adjunction structure, which I ascribed to poetic license. While I did not study the distribution of such variants within the bicolon, as...