Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Finite Clause

When a Biblical Hebrew writer places the subject, object or adverbial before the verb, something is being signalled. Adina Mosak Moshavi sets out to say exactly what. Drawing on four decades of research into word-order variation across the world's languages, she examines the finite, non-subordinate clause in classical Biblical Hebrew, formally separating preposing from other marked and unmarked constructions and mapping how each is distributed.

The heart of the study is a close contextual reading of preposed clauses in the book of Genesis. From it Moshavi argues that most fall into one of two syntactic-pragmatic constructions: focusing or topicalisation. The work is meticulous yet approachable, and it will reward students of Biblical Hebrew as well as linguists drawn to the question of how grammatical form carries pragmatic meaning.