Grace J. Park, "Focus Construction with kî ʾim in Biblical Hebrew "
English | ISBN: 1646022467 | 2023 | 300 pages | EPUB, PDF | 743 KB + 3 MB
English | ISBN: 1646022467 | 2023 | 300 pages | EPUB, PDF | 743 KB + 3 MB
This study uses modern linguistic theory to analyze a frequently recurring syntactic phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible that has thus far resisted explanation: כי אם.
The combination of the two particles כי and אם produces a construction that is notoriously difficult to describe, analyze syntactically, and translate. Dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew offer a dizzying variety of translations for this construction, including “that if,” “except,” “unless,” “but,” “but only,” and “surely,” among other possibilities. In this book, Grace J. Park provides a new approach that strives for greater precision and consistency in translation. Park argues that כי אם is used in three patterns: the “full focus” pattern, the “reduced focus” pattern, and the less common “non-focus” pattern. Her syntactic analysis of all 156 occurrences of the כי אם construction in the Bible lends greater clarity to the contested passages.
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