Oath Formulas in Biblical Hebrew.

• Author: Hutton, Jeremy M.
• Position: Book review

Oath Formulas in Biblical Hebrew. By BLANE CONKLIN. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic, vol. 5. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS. pp. xii 106. $34.50.

In this slim volume based upon his 2005 University of Chicago dissertation completed under Dennis Pardee, Conklin seeks to provide a syntactic investigation of Biblical Hebrew [BR] oath formulas--a project that has remained wanting in Hebrew studies, despite several short contributions to the issue by earlier grammarians. Conklin's study attempts to demonstrate that previous interpretations of oath formulas have often misunderstood their objects of study. In particular, three of the most common features of oaths have eluded proper explanation: (a) the phrase "Thus will DN do (to PN) and thus will he add (to PN)" has been analyzed as the apodosis of the following protasis, usually formulated with 'inz (e.g., "if ['im] I do X"); (b) the word Id has frequently been analyzed as an asseverative particle ("indeed"), or even as a conditional particle (cf. NRSV Ruth 1:17: "May the Lord do thus and so to me, if even [kr] death parts me from you!" [emphasis added]); (c) finally, the consecution 'inz has been interpreted as an asseverative compound particle (e.g., NRSV I Sam. 21:6 [Eng. v. 51: "Indeed women have been kept from us . ." [emphasis added]). All three interpretations are mistaken, argues Conklin.

The book proceeds in a well-organized and intuitive manner: chapter 1 (pp. 1-12) provides an overview of the problem; a discussion of "oaths as speech acts," in which Austin's distinction between locution and illocution is probed along with linguists' differentiation between the "use" and "mention" of utterances; a discussion of "the general structure of oaths," stressing Searle's distinction between the authenticating element (the authenticator) and the content of the oath itself, as well as oaths' tendency towards ellipsis; a review of scholarship on BH oaths; and a short precis to the remainder of the study. Foundational for the study is the cross-linguistic discussion of Searle's view that oaths typically possess a binary structure; this generalization is adopted as a working principle in the remainder of the study, although Conklin extends Searle's analysis of sentence-level utterances to discursive units as a whole. Conklin interprets this binary structure of oaths in such a way as to demand that the two constituents operate independently of one another syntactically.

In chapter 2 (pp. 13-30) Conklin summarizes the variety of "authenticating elements" found both in Hebrew oath usage and in descriptions of oaths. This outline covers both narrated (e.g., Dan. 12:7) and...