NARRATIVE SYNTAX AND THE HEBREW BIBLE Papers of the Tilburg Conference 1996 EDITED BY ELLEN VAN WOLDE t-tGtD t'..o ...: 7' 'r"' I r- ? ,_ .( .4 . c, 1 6s'l · BRILL LEIDEN · NEW Y ORK · KOLN 1997 LINGUISTIC MOTIVATION AND BIBLICAL EXEGESIS Ellen van Wolde ( Tilburg) Modern exegesis of the Hebrew Bible is both historically and literary orientated, the former concentrating on the historical development of the Biblical texts and the latter on the Biblical text as a literary unity, in which a growing awareness is revealed for the reader's contribution to the interpretation of the text. What then is the sig- nificanee of linguistic descriptions of the Hebrew verb system, as presented in this book Narrative and the Hebrew Bible, for Biblical exegesis? Of course, the starring point of every exegesis is that the Hebrew language system provides the conditions for the textual com- munication, and that therefore linguistics is necessary for exegetes to acquire basic insights into the elementary phonological, morphologi- cal, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of Biblical Hebrew. However, the disadvantages of linguistic studies are easily discovered as well. One of these is the inaccessibility of linguistic literature; another is the lack of clear definitions and criteria, and another, even more important, is the scarcity of explanations of the choices made and of the principles on which these choices are based; these probiernatie aspects often are reinforeed by a cryptic or diagramrnatic style. . At the same time most linguistic studies of Biblical Hebrew mainly focus on the analysis of how the forms are organized. Only a few deal with the question of motivation and ask w!ry a specific form is used in a certain text. The present paper opts for a study of the question: What motivates an author of Biblical Hebrew to choose a certain verbal form or a certain clause arrangement to communicate his message to the reader? This study starts with the concept of markedness and unmarkedness, continues with views of a pragmati- cally oriented Hebrew narrative syntax and deals mainly with ques- tions of representation and grounding. The intention is to show the consequences of such a linguistic approach for Biblical exegesis and to elucidate the importance of a linguistic study for the literary study of narrative texts in the Hebrew Bible.