Word Order in Biblical Hebrew Poetry: A Reassessment of the Concept of Focus

Abstract

It is no understatement that the issue of Biblical Hebrew word order in prophetic and poetic texts is a difficult and foreboding one. Although the last two decades have seen a number of monographs published on BH word order, the difficulty of surveying these works is greatly diminished by their common theoretical background. Knud Lambrecht’s Information Structure and Sentence Form (1994)1) proved immensely influential on the following generations of Hebrew grammarians interested in word order. This study will examine and compare the word-order proposals of Nicholas P. Lunn and Adina Moshavi, as they represent contrasting approaches to the terminology of topic and focus, but are still both very much bound to the same set of questions. Although Moshavi’s corpus was restricted to narrative (specifically Genesis), her criteria for what constituted marked word is similar to that of Lunn, and thus the comparison of the two works is possible in every area except for Moshavi’s deliberate lack of coverage of poetic parallelism. After conducting a critique of the linguistic viability of this topic/focus framework, this study will suggest a new way forward for understanding non-canonical word order in Hebrew poetry, using