Department of Hebrew Language

A Pragmatic Analysis of Legal Proofs of Criminal Intent is a detailed investigation of proofs of criminal intent in Israeli courtrooms. The book analyses linguistic, pragmatic, interpretative and argumentative strategies used by Israeli lawyers and judges in order to examine the defendant’s intention. There can be no doubt that this subject is worthy of a thorough investigation. A person’s intention is a psychological phenomenon and therefore, unless the defendant chooses to confess his intent, it cannot be proven directly – either by evidence or by witnesses’ testimonies. The defendant’s intention must be inferred usually from the overall circumstances of the case; verbal and situational contexts, cultural and ideological assumptions and implicatures should be taken into account. The linguistic analysis of these inferences presented here is necessarily comprehensive: it requires consideration of a variety of theoretical frameworks including speech act theory, discourse analysis, argumentation theory, polyphony theory and text linguistics.

The present article elucidates the chronological functions of the verb form wayyiqtol in the Biblical Hebrew. By dint of on an analysis of the form’s different usages, we reexamine the accepted grammatical assumption that the consecutive (or sequential) form represents an action which occurs after an anterior action in the same continuum, namely that consecutive forms express chronological or logical succession.  This premise is based on the wide distribution of consecutive forms serving in either capacity, whereas those that do not express chronological succession are deemed to be exceptions.  Nevertheless, we would like to suggest a different point of view. Placing the exceptions at the center of our analysis has enabled us to redefine the role of consecutive forms in the Biblical Hebrew. The findings of this study indicate that these forms mark the event and reference time as one unit [R,E]. As a result, the ordinary and most prevalent usage of this form—the signification of chronological sequence—should be regarded as but one of its optional applications.

παρακέκλησθε οὖν µετ᾿ εὐνοίας καὶ προσοχῆς τὴν ἀνάγνωσιν ποιεῖσθαι καὶ συγγνώµην ἔχειν ἐφ᾿ οἷς ἂν δοκῶµεν τῶν κατὰ τὴν ἑρµηνείαν πεφιλοπονηµένων τισὶ τῶν λέξεων ἀδυναµεῖν· οὐ γὰρ ἰσοδυναµεῖ αὐτὰ ἐν ἑαυτοῖς ἑβραϊστὶ λεγόµενα καὶ ὅταν µεταχθῇ εἰς ἑτέραν γλῶσσαν. Σοφία Σειράχ, Prologue 1 .

The present article delves into the syntactic role of Biblical Hebrew verb forms with an inflected prefix and the suffix final nun. In the research literature, there are two central arguments concerning this phenomenon. As per the first camp, the final nun underwent a process of erosion. Consequently, its distinction vis-à-vis the suffix final -0 lapsed to the point where the two became free variants. The other school of thought claims that there remains a functional syntactic difference between the two suffixes in the Biblical Hebrew. By formulating a new analytical framework, the author builds on the second hypothesis. Aside for the final nun’s prevalent uses in dependent clauses marked by a subordinating conjunction, this suffix appears in a wide array of clauses in which it signifies the verb as a non-innovative element in the sphere of the message. In this paper, the nexus between these two usages is theoretically bolstered by a typological comparison of the various fields that host different subjunctive categories in different Semitic languages.

In this comparative study of ancient Semitic languages, I present data on the development of personal pronouns and accusative markers. My meta-analysis combines what is known about the major representative languages from both East and West Semitic languages in order to focus on three gradual, corresponding developments: (1) the erosion of inflected oblique independent personal pronouns; (2) the disappearance of the case-ending system; and (3) the emergence of the independent object marker. A bird's-eye view of the documented evidence on Semitic languages suggests that in West Semitic languages, both the oblique independent personal pronoun and the case-ending system gradually disappeared. In parallel, a set of object markers was introduced into West Semitic. This process will be shown to progress at a different pace for the various languages in this branch, and to be relevant not only to the Northwest Semitic branch, but rather to the span of old West Semitic languages.

In this interdisciplinary article, we rely on insights from the study of modern Arabic diglossia in general and of the Palestinian Arabic dialects in particular, to shed light on the history of Hebrew. The discussion of the historical essence of Hebrew has been at the center of an intensive debate. The main dispute is between supporters of the “traditional” philological approach, who claim that it is possible to draw a historical picture of linguistic development, and the “revisionists” who seek to challenge the very possibility of drawing such a picture. Using Marc Bloch’s historical method, this article combines historical discussion with synchronic observation. Our premise is that despite many differences between the ancient and modern periods, there are also aspects of similarity that can be compared in order to understand the ancient historical processes. Among the central aspects of this comparison are the following features: similarly polyglot communities; social milieus allowing language contact between close Semitic languages; the possibility of describing the dialects according to geographical, social and ethnic aspects; and a diglottic continuum between canonical language and colloquial varieties. We illustrate this comparative method by examining one concrete linguistic question—the formation of 3ms and 3fs pronouns.
The challenge regarding the ancient Hebrew forms of these pronouns has been how to explain the fact that in the Hebrew of Qumran, the forms which seem typologically more archaic than the forms that ,הואה/היאה are
We show that this difficulty exists .(הוא/היא) appear in Biblical Hebrew
only to the extent that we assume a uniform and continuous historical developmental line for the Hebrew language. Comparison with the Modern Arabic Palestinian dialects enables us to understand that these features of written Hebrew are actually only a few remnants of a wide range of dialects that characterized the ancient period.

This contribution examines an interdisciplinary approach to the historical characterization of the Hebrew language during the Persian period – a pivotal stage in the Bible’s development. We rely on a variety of sources to outline the historical context of the linguistic milieu in this era, and bring linguistic evidence from epigraphy for the multiglotic situation in the southern and central parts of Palestine during this period. Furthermore, building on Marc Bloch’s historical method, we describe the ancient reality through the comparative perspective of modern Arabic Palestinian dialects from the same geographical expanse. These observations lead us to conceptualized LBH as literary embodiment of a multi-lingual historical reality.

The paper implements an interdisciplinary approach to the historical characterization of the Hebrew language during the Persian period by investigating three morpho-syntactic constructions – the Infinitive Construct, the Infinitive Absolute and the Relative Pronoun. The analyses provide evidence for the impact of colloquial Canaanite variants, particularly Phoenician, on LBH. Areas of structural and functional overlap and divergence between LBH and Phoenician are demonstrated, indicating that these three forms did not constitute new paradigms, but were competing alternatives to the classical options. The paper concludes with the claim the texts composed in Persian Judea were shaped by a mixed, living language, that had a profound effect on grammatical systems which are highly susceptible to transfer in contact situations.

Until about three decades ago, the historical evidence from the southern
administrative unit in the land of Israel, ‘Idumea’, was relatively limited.
The discovery of about 2,000 ostraca from this administrative unit in
the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century
has significantly altered our historical understanding of daily life in this
area during the Persian period (538–332 bce). The first-hand evidence of
these ostraca has taught us for example about the movement of goods,
the status of employees, and issues of land ownership. Moreover, as these
administrative texts document both private and social life as they are
reflected in verbal usage, they allow us to glimpse the complex linguistic
strata in this geographical expanse and historical period. For example,
these texts contain a variety of proper names belonging to people who
lived in Idumea during the Persian period, indicating a multinational and
multilingual situation that stands in a sharp contrast to the administrative
language employed throughout the ostraca in which these names are
mentioned, namely official Aramaic. The paper conducts a linguistic
inquiry into the different languages that are threaded together by these
proper names as evidence of the melting pot of spoken tongues in this
area. We further integrate these findings with historical evidence from
the Bible, allowing us to re-interpret Nehemiah’s famous words (Neh
13:24) in a theoretical and historical framework with implications for our
understanding of the forces that shaped Late Biblical Hebrew.

The paper provides an elaboration on previous situation-based proposals to a puzzle that is widely discussed in various investigations of Biblical Hebrew verbal formsthe juxtaposition of the adverb ˀaz and yiqtol forms. The interpretation of the usages of the yiqtol form in Reichenbachian terms of Reference Time and Event Time is shown to be an invaluable tool in accounting for the relative nature of this form. The analyses of examples of ˀaz +Verb illustrate the chronological relations in Biblical Hebrew, that are shown to be identical to the temporal functions of the same verb forms when they are not preceded by ˀaz. Thus, yiqtol and qatal forms are consistently used to express distinct meanings of posteriority, simultaneity, and anteriority, irrespectively of their syntactic contexts. The meaning of the adverb ˀaz is also explored, and is shown to indicate a transition point that summarizes the eventualities in the preceding discourse segment while at the same time providing the situational context (i.e., Reference-time) for the temporal interpretation of the subsequent verbal form. The paper identifies the English translation of yiqtol forms as a major source for the discrepancy found in previous analyses. It concludes by suggesting that the intricate details of the chronological situation encoded by Biblical Hebrew morphology should be the starting point for any attempt at interpretation, particularly when the target language of the translation lacks forms that encode equivalent meanings.

The study focuses on an individual rabbi from Early Modern Poland, Maharam of Lublin, and his writing proficiency. We explore the Maharam’s competence in recruiting different linguistic devices to serve both specific textual functions as well as the overall communicative function of the text. Taking the combined perspectives of Historical Discourse Analysis and usage-based corpus linguistics, we analyze one Responsum as an example of this historically–and in our view linguistically– important source of study. Specifically, we investigate the distributions of the lexical items the Maharam employed in different textual units according to their linguistico-historical strata. Our analyses show that these distributions are either highly constrained or reflect a distributionally-dominant component in each texteme, which corresponds to a particular discursive function. In writing this text, the Maharam skilfully and systematically transitions between different linguistic models. His command of the Hebrew strata reflects a literate, functionally-motivated nusach.