Unit Delimitation in Biblical Hebrew and Northwest Semitic Literature

Series: Pericope 4 - Scripture as written and read in antiquity
Bible scholars and translators are often confronted with the problem of sectioning biblical texts. Until recently sentence division and paragraphing were largely left to the imagination of the individual scholar. This resulted in a wide range of different divisions of one and the same text. There is, however, a lot of long neglected evidence on how the ancient scribes themselves understood the structure of the texts they were transmitting.

Research in ancient scribal traditions shows that in the entire ancient Near East scribes provided their texts with special, structuring markers. For example, rulings, lines left open, extra large capitals, different colouring at the beginning of new passages, and for the division into smaller units, strokes, dots and spaces. Actually many markers lending structure to our modern texts appear to be derived from very ancient customs.

This volume contains the papers read during the Third Pericope Meeting held in connection with the SBL International Meeting at Berlin, 2002. Topics discussed are the unit delimitation in parts of Genesis, Numbers, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Psalms, and Song of Songs. Furthermore general studies on Masoretic accentuation, the importance of pausal forms for unit delimitation, description of scribal practices in the Jewish tradition, as well as unit division in Northwest Semitic texts are included.

Pericope is a new successful series that aims at making available data on unit delimitation found in biblical and related manuscripts to the scholarly world and to evaluate these data for the benefit of biblical interpretation.


From the Contents

R. de Hoop, Genesis 49 Revisited: The Poetic Structure of Jacob's Testament and the Ancient Versions

R. de Hoop, `Trichotomy' in Masoretic Accentuation in Comparison with the Delimitation of Units in the
Versions: With Special Attention to the Introduction to Direct Speech

M.C.A. Korpel, The Priestly Blessing Revisited (Num. 6:22-27)

M.C.A. Korpel, WhoIs Who? The Structure of Canticles 8:1-7

I. Kottsieper, Zu graphischen Abschnittsmarkierungen in nordwestsemitischen Texten

J.M. Oesch, Skizze einer formalen Gliederungshermeneutik der Sifre Tora

J.W. Olley, Trajectories in Paragraphing of the Book of Ezekiel

G.T.M. Prinsloo, Unit Delimitation in the Egyptian Hallel (Psalms 113{118)

P. Sanders, Pausal Forms and the Delimitation of Cola in Biblical Hebrew Poetry

E. Ulrich, Impressions and Intuition: Sense Divisions in Ancient Manuscripts of Isaiah