Search

The English word shibboleth has its origins in an episode narrated in Judg. 12.1–6. The story there revolves around the Hebrew word שִׁבֹּלֶת šibbōlεṯ, meaning both ‘ear of grain’ and ‘flow, stream, torrent’ (15× and 4×, respectively, in the Bible). In Judg. 12.6 the form סִבֹּ֗לֶת sibbōlεṯ occurs as well, alongside the standard form of the noun. The use of both forms in this verse is prime evidence for the existence of regional dialects in ancient Hebrew, at least in the realm of phonology (in this case, a dialectal difference between Ephraim…

A seal is an object, usually made of stone, which has been designed and fashioned by a craftsman with carved shapes and/or letters. The mark of the seal, called a bulla, is its impression on a piece of tin, generally used to seal documents. Seals and bullae are known to have been in use throughout the ancient Near East from the 3rd millennium B.C.E., both in Egypt and in Mesopotamia. The main use of the seals was to authorize legal documents. Their presence represented the testimony and agreement of the seal’s owner to the contents of a written document. The number of bullae that have been pr…

Deir ʿAllā, in present-day Jordan, is commonly identified with biblical סֻכּוֹת sukkōṯ Succoth which formed part of Gilead on the Eastern side of the Jordan River (Lipiński 2006:288–293). It belonged to the Kingdom of Israel, but was conquered in ca. 837 B.C.E. by Damascus and eventually fell to Assyria in 732 B.C.E. The site served as an important sanctuary during the Late Bronze Age, but not necessarily so in later periods (van der Kooij 1993). Excavations were initiated by Henk Franken in 1960. In March 1…

A ‘nominalization’ is a linguistic expression that encapsulates a proposition in a noun-like form, ready to be inserted in a syntactic slot prototypically reserved for nouns. Modern Hebrew has four nominalization constructions: (1) Action noun (שם פעולה šem peʿula): e.g., שבירה švira ‘breaking’; העשרה haʿašara ‘enriching’ (Rosén 1962:256–259). Coffin and Bolozky (2005:47) use ‘verbal noun’, but also ‘gerund’ (Coffin and Bolozky 2005:287). (2) Gerund (מקור נטוי maqor naṭuy ‘inflected infinitive’ or ‘infinitive construct’): e.g., הגיע- hagiʿ - in בהגיעו be-hagiʿo ‘in/upon hi…

1. Syntax and morphology The Hebrew definite article, -ה ha- ‘the’, is a bound prefix attached to nouns, adjectives, demonstratives, and some pronouns. While the semantic and pragmatic factors governing its distribution are by and large similar to those governing the distribution of definite articles in many other languages, the Hebrew article is also subject to several language-specific morphosyntactic constraints. While in Classical Hebrew the article alternated between the phonologically-conditioned variants -הַ ha-, -הֶ hε-, and -הָ hå̄-, in Modern Hebrew it is almos…

Introduction This entry treats the phonology of Biblical Hebrew, though on occasion we will refer to data from beyond the domain of BH per se. The methodology utilized here is that of historical linguistics, especially since the relevant information covers more than a thousand years (for an earlier treatment, on which the current essay is largely based, see Rendsburg 1997; for amplification of some of the topics treated herein, see Kutscher 1982:12–30; for theoretical approaches to the subject Phonology, Generative and…

1. Channels of Propaganda Election propaganda consists of texts whose objective is to convince potential voters to cast their votes for a given person or party. These texts are conveyed through diverse channels of communication. Traditional channels include the printed media (advertisements in the press, leaflets, billboards, and stickers) and electronic media (propaganda broadcasts on radio, television, and in movie theaters as well as televised debates between major candidates). In the last decade…

1. Introduction Personal names are an important part of the vocabulary in every language. Hebrew given names are usually based on meaningful lexemes. Personal names can be classified by origin (that is, whether they occur already in Biblical Hebrew, in the Diaspora literature, or only in Modern Hebrew), by their structures, and use for female and male individuals. Biblical names are considered at present traditional, usually reflecting names that have been passed down in a family through the gener…

Apposition is a syntactic relation distinct from both coordination and subordination (Burton-Roberts 1994; Livnat and Sela 1995), usually consisting of a sequence of two (or more) expressions that share the same syntactic function and definition. The elements of such a sequence can be identical in reference (‘full apposition’) or the reference of one may be included in the reference of the other (‘partial apposition’). The term ‘apposition’ may be used to refer either to the entirety of an appositional ph…

The names used to denote the Hebrew language, past and present, can be divided into two main groups: those derived from the Hebrew root עב״ר ʿ-b-r, i.e., ‘Hebrew’ = עברי ʿiḇri, and those which express the sacred, scriptural status of Hebrew as the ancestral ‘Holy Tongue’ = לשון קודש ləšon haq-qodeš. 1. ‘Hebrew’ The term עברית ʿiḇriṯ ~ עברי ʿiḇri ‘Hebrew’ as a linguistic designation does not occur in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew language is there referred to either as שְׂפַת כְּנַעַן śəp̄aṯ kənaʿan ‘the language of Canaan’ (as opposed to Egypt—Isa. 19.18) or adverbially as יְהוּדִית yəhūḏīṯ ‘in …

Deixis in linguistics encompasses the concepts of ‘person deixis’ ( הוא hu ‘he’, היא hi ‘she’, הם hem ‘they [m.]’, and הן hen ‘they [f.]’), ‘spatial deixis’ (demonstrative pronouns and adjectives, and locative demonstrative adverbs, such as פה po/כאן kan ‘here’, הנה hena ‘(to) here, hither’, and שם šam ‘there’), ‘temporal deixis’ (e.g., עכשיו ʿaxšav ‘now’, אז ʾaz ‘then’), ‘social deixis’ (i.e., indicators of social rank and relationship between participants, e.g., אדון ʾ adon ‘Mister, sir’/אדוני ʾ adoni ‘my lord, sir’/כבודו kvodo ‘his honor’גברת gveret ‘Miss, Ms.’/גברתי gvirti ‘m…