Reframing Biblical Studies

Words, on Ellen van Wolde's account, are the tips of encyclopedic icebergs: each one rests on a mass of cultural knowledge, experience and context that ancient readers carried without thinking. Van Wolde, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, brings cognitive grammar to biblical studies, treating language as a form of mental processing. She works through nominal profiles, atemporal relations and temporal relations before setting out a method of analysis, then tests it on a single Hebrew word and on Genesis 34, the story of Dinah at Shechem, including the three ways its opening verse can be used.

This is demanding, carefully built scholarship, and its rewards come from watching a familiar text yield new meaning under a different lens. Students and scholars of Hebrew, linguists curious about ancient texts and anyone wary of reading old words with modern assumptions will find it bracing.