Abstract
For centuries, Old Testament scholars have been analyzing the Biblical Hebrew texts by making use of literary analysis. This tradition of literary interpretation doesn't leave much room for a systematic linguistic analysis of Biblical Hebrew, and of Biblical Hebrew poetry in particular. Thus, poetic texts are considered to be artistic and beautiful, but individual pieces of art. This gap between Linguistics and poetry in the discipline of Old Testament studies is also visible in the literary approach's claim that in poetry the use of verbal forms isn't bound to any grammatical rules, but expresses the Biblical poet's rhetorical skills. This claim is the main source of the research problem that will be dealt with in this dissertation: the ignorance of scholars regarding the functions of verbal forms in Biblical Hebrew poetry. As a solution to this problem we will propose a methodological shift from literary interpretation to linguistic analysis. Since the second half of the twentieth century Old Testament scholars have started to pay attention to the interaction between Theology and Linguistics which eventually resulted in the formation of a new approach called Text-Linguistics. Advocators of this approach stimulate the use of linguistic instruments in the analysis of Biblical Hebrew texts and assume this analysis should start with an investigation of the syntactic structures and relations that can be found within these texts. Because verbal forms fulfill important functions in the syntactic ordering of the texts, many text-linguistic publications concentrate on the analysis of the linguistic functions that can be assigned to these different verbal forms. Unfortunately, text-linguists until now have mainly been analyzing prosaic texts, while poetic texts and their use of verbal forms have hardly received any attention. Therefore, based on these two shifts - the first one being methodological, the second being related to text-linguistics' object of study - a new methodological framework will be presented. Within this framework we will introduce the hypothesis that there is one single linguistic system which underlies the use of verbal forms in both Biblical Hebrew poetry and Biblical Hebrew prose. Taking the observation of many analogies between discursive prose's verbal system and poetry's use of verbal forms as a starting point in our research project, our hypothesis will be tested by critically analyzing text-linguistic publications about the functions of verbal forms in discursive prose and poetry and by performing our own linguistic analysis of the functioning of verbal forms in discursive prose and poetry. At the end of our research, we will investigate how our research may help the Bible translator and the Old Testament exegete - both often feeling very uncomfortable whith the practical situation of a free interpretation of verbal forms dependent on insight in context and on ones own intuition - to establish a more consistent interpretation of verbal froms in classical Hebrew poetry.