Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-3173

Title: Prose and Poetry through Time
Subtitle: Hebrew Verb Form Semantics in Zechariah
Series Title: Studia Semitica Neerlandica
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Brill
http://www.brill.com
Book URL: https://brill.com/display/title/69910

Author(s): Stephen L. L. Huebscher

Reviewer: Geoffrey Sampson

SUMMARY

Stephen Huebscher seeks to shed new light on a central problem in the linguistic description of Biblical Hebrew through statistical examination of verb usage in one Old Testament book.

The main contrast in the Hebrew inflection system is between two ways of conjugating verbs for person and number: the Suffix and the Prefix conjugations. The contrast clearly relates in some way to TAM (tense, aspect, and modality) issues; it is complicated by the fact that when a verb is preceded by the consonant /w/, meaning “and” (which happens frequently, Biblical Hebrew being a VSO language), the TAM implications of the conjugations are radically altered. The only conceptual categories available to Ashkenazi Jews for analysing this area of grammar were those of logic and European languages, and it was usual to describe Suffix and Prefix conjugations as respectively “past tense” and “future tense”, and to describe /w/ as swapping the meanings of the two conjugations. Thus, the root ‘sh-m-r’ means “to guard” (Hebrew verb roots are normally sequences of three consonants, with the vowels of a verb form determined by its grammatical role); with first person singular affixes, ‘shamárti’ and ‘w + eshmor’ wouldbe glossed “(and) I guarded”, ‘eshmor’ and ‘w + shamárti’ as “(and) I shall guard”.
With the rise of structural linguistics, Hebraists became aware of the subtleties of TAM in various languages, and realized that “past tense/future tense” are inadequate as descriptions of the Hebrew conjugations. But despite Biblical Hebrew being, as Huebscher says, “one of the most studied linguistic systems among ancient languages”, scholars have found it remarkably difficult to pin down just what did determine the usage of this central grammatical contrast. Gideon Goldenberg (2013: 203) wrote that “a constant flux of publications on Biblical Hebrew tenses continues, with repeated discussions of the question whether they indicate time or aspect.” Elsewhere (Sampson 2024: 125) I have offered this topic as evidence against the idea that different languages are alternative codings for a universal system of concepts.

One idea, suggested for instance by Alviero Niccacci (1986), is that the wealth of data might become more orderly if we suppose that the semantic implications of the conjugations depend on the written genre in which a verb appears; genres discussed by Niccacci included poetry v. prose, and historical narrative v. direct speech. In 2017 I reviewed (linguistlist.org/issues/28/2171/) a book by Robert Longacre and Andrew Bowling (2015) which elaborated this idea, describing what the authors saw as diverse implications of the Suffix/Prefix contrast in as many as nine distinct genres of Biblical Hebrew, some of them, for instance “complaints and lamentation”, quite specialized. Meanwhile, Huebscher tells us that Niccacci has since (2006: 247) changed his mind about the relevance of genre.
Huebscher’s book (derived from a PhD thesis of Clarks Summit University, recently closed) focuses chiefly, though not solely, on the poetry/prose distinction. He has created a database containing every verb token found in the book of Zechariah (sometimes spelled Zachariah – in Hebrew the first vowel is a shwa), tagged with its membership of Suffix or Prefix conjugation, with the genre in which the token appears, and with many TAM-relevant features of the context, for instance whether the time of the action appears to precede, coincide with, or follow the time of writing, and whether the action is completed or ongoing. Huebscher’s database comprises 621 verb tokens, omitting a few for which there is debate about whether the standard Masoretic text faithfully reflects the original form. The entire database is shown as an appendix to the book, though Huebscher has of course explored it electronically.

Two main reasons make Zechariah a suitable book for this purpose. First, Huebscher obviously needed a book which includes both poetry and prose, as Zechariah does. But also, the 14 chapters of Zechariah fall into two sections, dividing between Chapters 8 and 9, which are so different that many have taken the sections to have separate authors. The earlier section dates itself explicitly to a specific period, 520–515 B.C., after the return of the Jews from exile; the later section is undated, and some have argued that it was written later, perhaps centuries later. As one pointer, Huebscher cites a mention in v. 9.13 of Greece rather than Persia as a dominant power – though some scholars believe this was a spurious insertion. Huebscher uses his database to produce new evidence bearing on the issue of single or separate authorship of the sections. He also mentions that Zechariah seems to be freer than some books from foreign-language influence.

The contents of Zechariah consist largely of mysterious prophetic visions. For Christians the most interesting passage must surely be vv. 9.9–10, foretelling the arrival of a king humbly riding on a donkey but destined to rule the whole world. However, Huebscher has nothing to say about the contents of Zechariah; he is concerned exclusively with its grammar.
The book comprises nine chapters. The first, long chapter introduces the history of analysis of the Suffix and Prefix conjugations, discusses a range of abstract conceptual categories which might be used to define the TAM implications of verb forms, and presents the research methods applied in the rest of the book. Then there is one chapter each on: Suffix conjugation; /w/ + Suffix conjugation; Prefix conjugation; /w/ + Prefix conjugation; imperatives; infinitives and participles. Each of these chapters includes tables showing the incidence of the respective verb forms, and identifies generalizations which emerge from the statistics; inevitably, these are tendencies rather than exceptionless laws, but some are rather clear tendencies – Huebscher lists generalizations which satisfy statistical significance tests, though he mentions no significance level higher than p < 0.05, and the issue of statistical significance is coveredonly cursorily. Then Chapter 8 relates these tendencies to past scholars’ views, which were often informed more by impressions than counts of instances. And finally Chapter 9 draws conclusions about the questions which motivated the research.

One appendix, already mentioned, reproduces Huebscher’s database; another appendix
summarizes Semiticists’ ideas about the prehistory of the Hebrew verb forms. A third appendix displays a series of scatter plots with lines of best fit, produced by friends of Huebscher, which graphically represent statistics derived from the database. I believe I understand what these plots are saying about the numerical data (though they are inadequately explained, and Huebscher avoids discussing them); but I struggle to see what they add to the body of the book.

Huebscher’s overall conclusion is that usage in Zechariah offers no support to the idea that conjugation choice is genre-dependent; he sees Biblical Hebrew as having a unified verbal system which functions the same way in poetry as in prose. (It is interesting to read that in some grammatical respects direct speech is closer to poetry than to non-speech prose.) Huebscher finds that the contrast between the conjugations aligns more closely with time than with aspect or modality. Also, his statistics fail to support the claim that the two sections of Zechariah are attributable to separate authors. Furthermore, grammatical statistics in the two Zechariah sections, together with some statistics about vocabulary choice, are compatible with the hypothesis that both sections date from about the same early post-exilic period.

Perhaps most of these conclusions might seem negative rather than positive. But serious scholars should welcome evidence that interesting hypotheses are false as much as evidence which supports them.

EVALUATION

Statistical analysis of this kind certainly seems a promising way of trying to move beyond impressionistic methods towards resolving a problem of language description as intractable as the Hebrew Suffix/Prefix contrast has shown itself to be. To that extent, the research Huebscher has undertaken is laudable.

I find aspects of its execution problematic, however. The most serious problem relates to
distinguishing poetry from prose. In the West today, this distinction feels obvious: poetry is set out in a special way on the printed page. But for ancient languages this is not necessarily true. Chinese poetry was traditionally printed continuously like prose. Some parts of the Masoretic Bible text, the Psalms for instance, are set in distinctive typography, but no passage of Zechariah is treated that way, at least in the edition on my shelves. What we mean by calling a stretch of wording “poetry” is that it has some sort of artistic unity deriving from linguistic features, such as metre or rhyme – not from mere typography. Hence distinguishing these genres can be an expert task.

Huebscher relies for this on two works published by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. These authorities do not agree perfectly, but Huebscher counts as poetry for his purposes just those Zechariah passages which both authorities treat as such; this, he says, “yields an excellent body of poetry”. Huebscher’s poetic corpus may be “excellent”, but it is not uncontroversial. The New English Bible was produced by a translation project that lasted over several decades after the Second World War, sponsored by all the main British churches other than the Roman Catholic and involving as translators numerous leading scholars, who critiqued one another’s translation drafts to arrive at final versions that all could accept. The NEB distinguishes poetry from prose typographically, but the set of Zechariah passages it treats as poetry are different from Huebscher’s list. There are passages which are poetry for the NEB but not for Huebscher, e.g. vv. 13.7–9, and passages on Huebscher’s list which are prose according to the NEB, e.g. all the many passages on that list from the earlier section of Zechariah. My point here is not to
suggest that the NEB scholars were correct and those followed by Huebscher mistaken – I am not qualified to adjudicate. But where there are such large differences of opinion among those who are well-qualified, and when poetry versus prose is Huebscher’s primary focus, I might have thought it desirable to do more than Huebscher does to justify the line he has taken. If the statistics were recalculated on the basis of the NEB division into poetry and prose, or of some other division different from Huebscher’s, might we not find that after all they did yield a genre difference in conjugation usage?

Huebscher’s Chapter 1 is very long, because he ranges far and wide in discussing other
publications which have analysed the TAM area, sometimes in extremely abstract ways. In connexion with modality he discusses the theories of logicians such as Saul Kripke and Alvin Plantinga who have sought to define the modal concepts of necessity and possibility by postulating a range of logically-possible worlds, one of which is the real world, and saying that “necessarily X” means “in all possible worlds X is true”, while “possibly X” means “X is true in at least one possible world”. This requires one to take a position on identity across worlds: if “he could have told us” means that there is some possible world in which he did tell us, how similar do the teller and the told in that world have to be to the real he and real us to count as the same people? When Zechariah was written, Biblical Hebrew was the everyday vernacular of peasants as well as priests – can accurately describing how they used their grammar really require consideration of such abstruse questions?

PhD theses do commonly include citations of prior publications tenuously linked to their topic; but, when Huebscher includes such a lengthy literature survey, it is odd that he does not mention the Longacre and Bowling book I cited above. Huebscher’s book contains only two brief and dismissive references to Longacre; at one point he says “no study [of Biblical Hebrew] has dealt squarely with the issue of the effect of genre on verbal function”, yet that is just what Longacre and Bowling have done. So far as I know, Robert Longacre is the most distinguished linguist to have argued for the relevance of genre to the semantic interpretation of linguistic forms, which he has been doing for many years. True, I am not persuaded by Longacre myself; but for anyone to argue a case without explicitly responding to the “leader of the opposition” inevitably weakens his case.

Huebscher’s English is not always as clear as it might be. Where he discusses data which he has presented in tabular form, I often found it difficult to see what feature of the table corresponded to a statement in the discussion; and when, for instance, Huebscher gives five lists of known differences between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew and says that one list “may be the most difficult to imitate successfully”, it was quite a while before I realized that he is referring to authors who tried to write in the style of an earlier age and found some archaic language features harder to adopt than others. Huebscher can also be unreliable in his handling of languages far less exotic than Hebrew. Where he quotes Christoph Müller as writing “Le ‘yiqtol’ est fondamentalement modal, tout comme le futur”, this does not mean “The ‘yiqtol’ is fundamentally modal, always as the future”: it means “... is modal, just as the future is”.

I found it mildly irritating that whenever Huebscher uses the word “paronomastic”, which he does frequently, it is always mis-spelled as “paranomastic”. (The Greek for “name” is ‘onoma’, not ‘noma’.)
The book production is superb, as one expects from Brill (now merged into “De Gruyter Brill”). The volume is handsome, and its print, including plenty of pointed Hebrew, is both clear and lovely. Huebscher’s many long footnotes are set as they should be, at the foot of the page, rather than as endnotes forcing readers to flick back and forth. I noticed scarcely any misprints, and only one non-trivial one: in a translation of Zechariah v. 6.15, where “I it will be” looks like a formal equivalent of idiomatic “it will be me”, the original just means “it will be” – perhaps an edit has not been tidied up properly. (Also in this example, the translation for some reason omits the last Hebrew word, ‘Elohekem’ “your God”.) The prelims include a list of abbreviations for book and journal titles, but many abbreviations used are not included in the list. These are minor blemishes on a worthwhile scholarly contribution.

REFERENCES

Goldenberg, G. 2013. Semitic Languages: features, structures, relations, processes. Oxford University Press.

Longacre, R.E., and A.C. Bowling. 2015. Understanding Biblical Hebrew Verb Forms: distribution and function across genres. SIL International Publications (Dallas, Tex.).

Niccacci, A. 1986. Sintassi del verbo ebraico nella prosa biblica classica. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (Jerusalem).

Niccacci, A. 2006. “The Biblical Hebrew verbal system in poetry”. In S.E. Fassberg and A. Hurvitz, eds., Biblical Hebrew in its Northwest Semitic Setting: typological and historical perspectives. Magnes Press (Jerusalem).

Sampson, G.R. 2024. Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century. Cambridge Scholars Publishing
(Newcastle upon Tyne).

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University, and his academic career was spent partly in Linguistics and partly in Informatics, with intervals in industrial research. After retiring as professor emeritus from Sussex University in 2009, he spent several years as Research Fellow at the University of South Africa. He has published contributions to most areas of Linguistics, as well as to other subjects. His latest book is “Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century” (2024).