Studies in Verbal Aspect and Narrative Technique in Biblical Hebrew Prose.

• Author: O'Connor, M.

Contending that earlier accounts of verbal aspect in Classical Biblical Hebrew narrative can be improved by using Frithiof Rundgren's theory of an aspectual hierarchy with neutralizations, Eskhult reviews the workings of Hebrew aspect and discusses as illustrations a variety of narratives, including the Moabite Stone and major sections of the Deuteronomistic History; he treats briefly the Joseph story, the Elijah and Elisha stories ("Narratives from the North"), and 2 Sam 13-20, and comprehensively Judges 6. Some developments associated with Late Biblical Hebrew are sketched. Numerous specific features of verbal usage are illuminated, e.g., performatives (pp. 21, 60, 80, 110; Eskhult uses the Germanism "coincident case," while some German writers now use such Anglicisms as "Performative Ausserung") and the ingressive character of prefixing forms of stative roots (e.g., pp. 59, 79).

The powerful figure of Rundgren, linguist and Semitist versed in the great literary traditions, dominates this book, as it does the recent Uppsala dissertation of Isaksson (1987) on Qoheleth. Eskhult is among the contributors to the magnificent collection, On the Dignity of Man: Oriental and Classical Studies in Honour of Frithiof Rundgren (Orientalia Suecana [henceforth OS] 33-35, 1984-1986). Rundgren's work has been neglected, and its complex evolution, from studies of aspect to linguistic approaches to literature and back to aspectual studies, with illustrations drawn from Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic, may furnish a context unfamiliar to readers of Eskhult's book. Rundgren's prose is as demanding as his work is ambitious; his linguistic vision of culture and text in his recent papers may remind American readers of Kenneth L. Pike. One major issue, then, in Eskhult's work is its text-linguistic approach to narrative art, and it may be that he provides too little background (pp. 10-11, 35-36) for his view to be fully grasped. I was not, at any rate, surprised to note that Walter Gross, in a review (Theologische Quartalschrift 170 [1990]: 307-8), refers to Eskhult's approach to narrative (and specifically the foreground/background distinction) as "grobschlachtig." Gross prefers (as I do) to allow for more complexity in the relationship between literary and linguistic studies than Rundgren and Eskhult find warrant for. Among scholars who would take a comparable approach is R. E. Longacre, whose book on the Joseph story (1989) appeared too late for Eskhult to...