Customer Reviews

Joseph: A Story of Divine Providence : A Text Theoretical and Textlinguistic Analysis of Genesis 37 and 39-48

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After teaching myself a modicum of Biblical Hebrew (BH) from the standard texts, I came to this book via B. Rocine's Learning Biblical Hebrew. Rocine's textbook (hard to obtain even from Amazon) itself is a good introduction to both BH and Discourse Linguistics and owes a lot to the work of both Alviero Niccacci and Robert Longacre. The categories and methods of Discourse Linguistics has greatly enriched my understanding of the verbal system of BH. Although the results of Discourse Linguistics investigations are still controversial and may not be accepted by all grammarians whose approaches are mainly tense, historical-comparative or aspect-based, they have added nuance and simplicity to the tangle of conflicting opinions on the uses of of verbal forms, e.g. wayyiqtol, qatal, weqatal, etc. , in Hebrew narrative.
Longacre's Joseph: A Story of Divine Providence manages to convey as clearly and concisely as possible its author's methods, intent and conclusions as he applies discourse analysis to the Joseph story. Anyone learning Hebrew on his/her own would benefit from this work and expand his/her horizons beyond the views learned in standard introductory and reference grammars.