Hebrew Parallelism

The presence of a female donkey (a “jenny”) in Matthew’s account of the triumphal entry (Matt 21:1-9) has been perplexing because her presence is not mentioned in either of Matthew’s sources, Mark 11:1-10 and Zech 9:9. Some scholars hold that the jenny comes from another tradition, but this does not make her presence a fulfillment of the prophecy. Others hold that Matthew broke the parallelism of Zech 9:9, where the humble Messiah is to ride into Jerusalem “on a (male) donkey, and on a colt,” but this too does not account for a female donkey at the scene. In this article, I argue for a plenary reading of the Hebrew prophecy where Matthew sees the presence of the jenny fulfilled in Zechariah’s characterization of the colt as a “son of jennies.”

(UPDATED version at https://www.academia.edu/62291589)  The Masoretic Text is annotated with special signs around the Hebrew text. They include cantillation accents, or the te'amim, which are applied to virtually every word of the text, indicating very precisely each word’s relationship with others in a phrase. There are two types of te'amim accents, disjunctive and conjunctive. Though not punctuation, the role of the stronger disjunctives nicely coordinate with punctuation and prose units to delimit the text into phrases, clauses, cola, and prose lines. The effort in this study is to: A) Provide an English formatted text of Genesis 1:1-2:3 to aid students in seeing the Hebrew prose structures embedded in the Masoretic Text; and B) Do an analysis of how the te'amim disjunctives are used in the Genesis text.

(Updated & expanded version) The Masoretic Text is annotated with special signs around the Hebrew text. They include cantillation accents, or the te'amim, which are applied to virtually every word of the text, indicating very precisely each word's relationship with others in a phrase. Though not punctuation, the role of the stronger te'amim disjunctives nicely coordinate with punctuation and prose units and they delimit the text into phrases, clauses, cola, and prose lines. The effort in this study is to: Part A-Provide an English formatted text following the te'amim of Genesis 1:1-2:3 to aid students in seeing the Hebrew prose structures embedded in the Masoretic Text; and Part B-Provide an analysis of how the te'amim disjunctives are used in the Genesis text. Includes examples of the benefits of a te'amim formatted text, disjunctive hierarchical diagrams of all 34 verses, and found patterns describing the behavior of the te'amim which can be used to guide parsing. The paper's discussion and findings are accessible for English readers.