Some words of praise for Benjamin J. Noonan's Advances in the Study of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.

As a Greek and NT specialist who teaches two semesters of Hebrew on a 2-year cycle, I need all the help I can get! Indeed, teaching Greek and Hebrew within 24 hours of each other really messes with my brain. True story: I was in the eye doctor's office the other day, trying to read the eye chart from right-to-left. I was confused, she was confused, we were all confused!

In light of that, I am almost finished with Benjain J. Noonan's brand new book, Advances in the Study of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. I'd like to mention a few positive aspects of the book, from the perspective of a Greek specialist who gets the privilege and challenge of teaching Hebrew grammar and syntax.

First, however, please note that this is not an easy book if you have not specialized in Hebrew at least at the ThM level (I have not). It is worthwhile if you invest time in it, but this is not your casual "get a bowl of ice cream to chill in my favorite chair" kind of a book. It's more like the "grab your highlighter and pen to take notes and . . . good gravy! I didn't even understand a stinking thing in that entire paragraph so I better read it again!" kind of a book.

Yet kudos to Noonan. He accomplishes what he set out to accomplish, and now that I am nearly at the end of the book, I feel that (1.) I definitely understand the key debates in Biblical Hebrew better, and (2.) I have a general idea of the areas I, personally, would like to explore more. 

Also, since Advances deals with broader linguistic categories, there were a couple moments that just "clicked" with me. For example, the discussion on page 122-23 of "prominence" was very helpful, and reading the following paragraph was an "aha, I get it now!" moment for me:

"In light of this framework, we consider modern English a tense-prominent language. On the one hand, English uses endings like -s and -ed to mark the present and past tense, respectively. ON the other hand, English requires the use of non-affixing helping verbs to express both aspect (e.g., perfective I wrote versus imperfective I was writing) and mood (e.g., realis I wrote versus irrealis I could be writing). Thus, a paradigm of the English verb is primarily marked for tense rather than aspect or mood. This is true even in English's non-indicative moods, which generally utilize the same inflectional paradigm as the indicative paradigm with the addition of helping verbs." (Noonan, Advances in the Study of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic).

I had never quite thought of "prominence" in those terms before. Indeed, one of the book's strengths is that this is a book on linguistics in a more general sense in addition to being a book on Biblical Hebrew.

I will say that sometimes I feel Noonan's own biases intrude a bit into his evaluation of the various positions. This is obviously not a bad thing per se, and it's not like I am in a position to criticize Noonan's grasp of Hebrew grammar and syntax! Nonetheless, I did come away from a couple of the discussions wondering if everybody had gotten quite the same "fair shake." I feel that the author was a bit more opinionated, for what it's worth, than Constantine Campbell's companion piece Advances in the Study of Greek (also an excellent book). This does not detract from the value of the book, since the reader still has enough information to decide for themselves which viewpoints they wish to study more.

One closing point. For most of the issues Noonan discusses, one is left with the impression that it is still a debate in progress. A couple interesting exceptions exist, however, including the issue of the dating of the Aramaic of Daniel. Scholarship seems to have decisively refuted the argument that the Aramaic of Daniel could not have been written before Alexander the Great. The work of K. A. Kitchen, especially, and the forthcoming dissertation by Jongtae Choi seem to have firmly established that Daniel's Aramaic is, at least primarily, Imperial Aramaic, within the range of 600-200 BC. Granted, that doesn't "prove" that Daniel wrote the book that bears his name, but at least it refutes objections that Daniel could not have written it, because Daniel's Aramaic is the sort of Aramaic (broadly categorized) that was in use during the Persian Empire.

Form Contributes to Meaning (Meaning is not simply the sum total of words)

The rise of discourse analysis in the past couple decades has been a great boon to biblical studies. The point is now being hammered home consistently: it is not enough to simply study words and sentences; rather, to truly grasp the entirety of meaning in Scripture, one must also study larger units of meaning, "discourse units," and how they interact with each other (e.g., how one "paragraph" leads into the other, etc.).

On the one hand, to borrow from Steve Runge's excellent work A Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament, discourse  affects "pragmatic meaning"--compare, for example, the different nuances between "Guess what our kid did today" vs. "Guess what your kid did today," in a conversation between husband and wife. Nothing has technically changed in regards to the overall meaning of the sentence, but the use of the 2nd person singular pronoun, a deviation from the norm here, hints at something ominous!

Even more than that, however, the arrangement of a simple waw conjunction in Hebrew can change how one should interpret a sentence. Consider Joshua chapter 4, specifically verse 9: "And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of Jordan . . ." (KJV). With most English translations, this raises problems: is this a second set of stones or did Joshua simply take the initial pile of stones and put them back in the river? Considering the fact that the middle of a river which would, soon, overflow its banks again would be a horrible place for a memorial, and considering the fact that chapter 4 focuses on "the place where they lodged" (v. 8) as the place of the memorial, verse 9 almost seems like a contradiction.

An understanding of Hebrew discourse here solves the issue and potentially offers up a new spiritual insight. 

To begin with, OT scholars universally acknowledge the waw-yiqtol (or waw-consecutive) syntactical construction as the indicator of past sequential action, i.e., the backbone of historical narrative ("Then Paul got into his car, then Paul drove it to the store, then Paul bought ice cream . . .").

Significantly, then, when the conjunction waw begins a clause attached to any other word but the imperfect (or, if you prefer, "preterite"--the identity of the specific conjugation is debated), then this often signifies the disruption of the sequential narrative, often for the purpose of providing background information (drawing from Runge again, kind of like the gar in Greek). 

For example: 
"Then Paul started [waw-yiqtol] his car, 
then Paul drove [waw-yiqtol] to the store, 
then Paul browsed [waw-yiqtol] the ice cream isle 
(now Paul had been hungry [disjunctive waw] for ice cream for quite a while), 
then Paul purchased [waw-yiqtol] ice cream . . ." etc. etc.

In Joshua 4, then, verse 8 has a heavy dose of waw-yiqtol verbs to carry it along--the actions of verse 8 are sequential. However, not so with verse 9a, which begins with a waw attached to the word for "two" followed by "ten" (i.e., "12"). In other words, the first part of verse 9 is most likely providing background information to what is going on: "Now Joshua had set up stones . . ." The waw-yiqtol pattern, i.e., the main story, resumes at the end of verse 9, "and they are there unto this day." The "there" (Hebrew sham) at the end of verse 9 links back to the very last word of verse 8, also "there" (sham).

Thus, in English, ". . . and carried them over with them unto the place where they lodged, and laid them down there (now Joshua had set up twelve stones . . .), and they are there [same place as verse 8] unto this day." 
[Note that, predictably, verse 10 does not start with the waw-yiqtol pattern] 

In other words, Joshua did not set up a second pile (what would be the point of having a memorial in the midst of a major river that would presumably soon be flowing again?), nor did he move a pile already set up as a memorial (v. 8). Rather, Joshua was responsible for getting the stones together, setting them near the priests, and thus facilitating the task of the twelve men he picked out. In other words, Joshua does not just give orders, he enables them! He engages in the task in such a way as to facilitate those who would carry them out. 

The lesson is this: anybody wishing to search for specific and precise spiritual lessons from Hebrew historical narrative, i.e., a significant portion of the Old Testament, had better study Hebrew discourse!