Janus parallelism is a literary device in which a middle stich of poetry parallels in a polysemous manner both the preceding and following lines. This study examines instances of the device in the Hebrew Bible with particular attention to the book of Job, though some discussion …
"447" Result
Sort By:
It has long been established that the text of the Hebrew Bible developed gradually over time. I contend that the very concept of Scripture as an authoritative text emerged through a protracted process, along with connected concepts of authorship, readership, and interpretation. …
This work has three foci. The first focus is the source of language in general, and the Hebrew language specifically. The second focus is on the processes of prophecy. In this study we investigated three processes: the first---in which the ears of the prophet hear the words that…
The ancient Babylonian city of Sippar, modern Abū-Habba, together with its twin-city, modern Tell ed-Dēr, remained one of the most important cult-centers throughout Babylonian history. Situated on the Euphrates, less than 50 km southwest of modern Baghdad, Sippar was the norther…
This thesis examines the organization and evolution of the administration of Egyptian Thebes in the early Ptolemaic period, as reflected in the papyri and ostraca of a community of mortuary priests. It has long been known that most of the papyri from early Ptolemaic Thebes belon…
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the largest of the Palestinian targums, translates the Pentateuch into Aramaic. Incorporated within its translation is interpretative material. As the latest Palestinian Targum, it includes interpretations found in earlier Palestinian targums as well as i…
This dissertation is a literary examination of the Israelite request for kingship in 1 Samuel 8 with satire in view as its genre. Chapter 1 begins by introducing the problem and shows how scholars have interpreted 1 Samuel 8 and the initiation of Israelite kingship through time.…
In recent years a growing realization has coalesced among comparative Semitists that the ventive/energic verbal endings evidenced throughout the various Semitic languages should be related to each other as retentions of an ancestral Proto-Semitic (PS) ventive/energic verbal morp…
Despite the complexity of the book of Samuel, the current explanation for the tensions in regards to kingship (due to conflicting early/late pro/anti-monarchical sources) is unsatisfactory. That a number of interpretations start from this binary choice leads to an oversimplifica…
Rebellion has been an incessant feature of human history and every society has had to struggle with it. The states of Israel and Judah were no different in this regard. These two societies, insofar as they are represented in the Hebrew Bible, discussed the topic of rebellion wit…
Over the past forty years, biblical scholars have appropriated the principles of literary criticism in their interpretive methods. However, they have only recently begun to examine the use of closure in the biblical text. I argue that closural analysis serves as an indispensable…
This study examines how classification of the adjective in Biblical Hebrew affects exegesis. The effects are studied via a representative example, the adjective gadol. After examining traditional classifications of the adjective in BH, the distribution of gadol is outlined in or…
The D stem verbal conjugation has traditionally been understood to express an intensive function compared to the G stem, which is considered the most basic conjugation in Semitic verbal systems. However, scholars have increasingly recognized that the actual uses attested for D s…
Statement of the Problem and Background Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-373) is one of the most well-known of Syriac writers. He is celebrated in the Eastern Churches not only for his theology and biblical commentary, but also for his achieved popularity as a proto-monastic figure. Af…
Since S. Rordam's initial effort in 1859-61 to provide a translation analysis of Syh in comparison with his Greek text, no detailed attempt has been made to provide in greater detail this necessary control if Syh is to be used accurately in reconstructing the textual history of …
The focus of the study is Deutero-Isaiah's use of parallelism, a rhetorical device found throughout the corpus, in approximately 87 percent of the lines examined. The study is descriptive and methodological in nature, intended to explore the mechanics of Deutero-Isaiah's paralle…
This is a synchronic analysis of Syriac prepositions in the Sinai manuscripts of the Gospels, which seeks to explain attested usages and develop theoretical understandings of how they function. The analysis posits that each use of a preposition can be related back to a single Ge…