Song 7:2–6 is (in)famous for how the man describes his beloved, from feet to head, with one seemingly ridiculous metaphor after another. While the aesthetic sense of these metaphors may seem odd to westerners, it was highly unlikely to be such for its original audiences. Thus, the fundamental question for biblical scholars, especially those concerned with metaphor is: How does the poet employ the visual similarities in the metaphorical imagery to allow readers/hearers access to how the man both perceives and conceptualises the physical beauty of his beloved? In other words, how can we as readers take the metaphors seriously without obliterating the metaphorical imagery? This article seeks to answer this question by employing a complexity approach which integrates poetic rhythm (additionally borrowing the concept of deceptive cadence from music), linguistic approaches to poetic parallelism, the use of emotion in lyric poetry, and metaphor analyses. This symphony of analyses hopes to explain how the metaphors function as a unity within the poetry’s rhythm, building toward a peak to express the man’s desire and excitement for his beloved. It concludes by offering an interpretation of the final verse’s interpretively difficult description of the woman’s hair as crimson, explaining how the woman’s head as Mount Carmel during a fiery sunset serves as a fitting conclusion to the poem that provides a befitting climactic closure for conveying the man’s desire for his beloved.

This article examines all evidence of the word combination προαίρεσις πνεύματος, which represents a linguistic and intellectual peculiarity of the LXX Ecclesiastes. It explains in which way the choice of words and the stylistic devices of the LXX translator, who is also a poet, puts into context the relation of προαίρεσις πνεύματος in LXX Ecclesiastes to Genesis 2–3 (serpent) and Job 1–2 (Satan), as well as to 1Sam 16:14 etc. (evil spirit), 1Kgt 22:19–23 par. 2Chr 18:18–22 (lying spirit) and Zach 13:2 (unclean spirit) and traces the vanity and nothingness in this world back to the purpose of the spirit.

The verb šḥt is worthy of investigation. It is a prominent verb of destruction that occurs throughout the Hebrew Bible. It is also polysemous. Furthermore, its basic meaning has not yet been determined in the various reference works and it defies the traditional wisdom that specific stems have specific meanings. Great advances have been made in utilising cognitive linguistic (CL) methodologies to interpret the Hebrew Bible (HB). We are not aware of any robust attempt at using insights from CL to investigate the meaning of šḥt. For this study, we utilised frame semantics (FS) and several other CL methodologies to gain insight into the semantic force of šḥt in the HB.

The conflict between Baal and Yamm in the Baal Cycle’s opening is notably considered a challenging scene to understand. This paper sees Yamm’s role as representing the customary and existing order rather than chaos or disorder. Such a function is revealed through Baal’s double paternity in the cycle. Instead of justifying one of the possibilities to read the conflict, this concept reconciles all possibilities in an alternative reading. Under the idea of Yamm as the customary and existing order, and Baal as the one who is attempting to disrupt the order, one can read the conflict politically, domestically, and naturally. However, as Baal’s propaganda, the defeated Yamm had to be portrayed as the opposite of order, namely chaos. The customary order has been broken and depicted as chaos for a political purpose: to promote the new order.

The Masoretic accents are, from different points of view, a neglected field of research. This is mainly because of the way that students of Biblical Hebrew are exposed to the accents in their formation years and to how the functional value of the accents was viewed. In recent years, a new scholarly interest in the accents has developed with a specific focus on the function and value of the accents. This article provides a short overview of some Biblical Hebrew grammars to indicate how these grammars have included and approached the study of Masoretic accents. This will be done by comparing the content of a number of introductory-level grammars as well as intermediate-level grammars. Attention will be given to grammars by South African scholars. After that, a number of conclusions are drawn, and several recent contributions on the topic are considered.

Messianic movements and their messianic claimants are surprisingly ubiquitous in Jewish history. The hypothesis is that these movements always show some influence from a previous form of mysticism and reach their expression and culmination in a renewed urgency for messianic activity. This article demonstrates that sixteenth-century messianic tensions, as an example of this phenomenon, repeatedly had their genesis in one or another system of mysticism. The deeper the mystical component, the more dramatic the messianism. The messianic claimant believes he has the power to speak to kings and popes and is convinced he has the means to immediately effect a change in the religious, political, and cosmic order. This investigation focuses on three sixteenth-century Jewish messiahs, Asher Lemlein, David Reuveni, and Shlomo Molcho. Each, as I show, was rooted in an earlier form of mysticism.

That Psalms 40:14–18 and 70 are (near) duplicates is well known. Previous research on these psalms has tended to focus on the question of origin, debating which was the original source for the other, with this then used to explain the variances between them, usually with the goal of establishing the original poem. This paper takes a different approach, arguing that the variances between the two are to be explained as evidence of shaping each to its current setting. These variances thus contribute to subtle changes in meaning between them which need to be recognised.

Bathsheba’s role in the story of the house of David bears an often-overlooked intertextual connection to the story of the Witch of Endor. In the books of Samuel, the two women triggered a chain of events that later led to the fall of the houses of David and Saul, respectively. While past scholarship has independently studied the importance of the stories of these two women, the present paper describes the intertextual connections and the significance of these two stories in the matrix of 1 and 2 Samuel and the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH). The two royal houses in the stories of these two women are subtly indicted for adulterous affairs against Yahweh. Consequently, the story of Saul at Endor and the story of David’s adultery with Bathsheba are not only intertextually connected to each other but also fulfil a subversive agenda.

In this paper I focus on the syntactic properties of subjects in impersonal verbal constructions in Biblical Hebrew. It is claimed that four types of subjectless verbal clauses—active finite and participial plural, active finite singular, passive, and stative—feature three types of impersonal subject: covert indefinite pronoun, inflectional morpheme, and zero-subject. It will be demonstrated that these subjects have different, only partly overlapping syntactic properties: The covert indefinite pronoun implies an animate subject that does not necessitate “collective interpretation” and can have generic scope; the subject can be topicalised, negated, and relativised, the verbal predicate is temporally vague. The 3rd masculine plural inflectional morpheme implies an animate collective subject; it can be controlled from the matrix clause and be used for participant tracking and anaphora; the verbal predicate is quite precisely anchored in time. The dummy zero-subject has no explicit subject properties; it can be theorised that the syntactic slot of a subject is taken by an overt cognate argument (Cause or Theme) of stative or passive verbs, but practically such a subject leaves no syntactic traces.

This article surveys the three sources at our disposal for the recovery of ancient northern Hebrew: a) Israelian Hebrew, that is, the dialect present in those portions of the Bible with a northern provenance; b) inscriptions from the northern kingdom of Israel, including Kuntillet ‘Ajrud; and c) Samaritan Hebrew. The overall goal is to determine the common lexical and grammatical features of this complex of northern Hebrew dialects from the biblical period, many of which are shared with Phoenician and Aramaic, though not with Judahite Hebrew.