Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 63:2 (Jun 2020)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

JETS 63:2 (June 2020) p. 345

Book Reviews

Basics of Hebrew Discourse: A Guide to Working with Hebrew Prose and Poetry. By Matthew H. Patton and Frederic Clarke Putnam. Edited by Miles V. Van Pelt. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019, 288 pp., $29.99.

Basics of Hebrew Discourse is authored by Matthew H. Patton (pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Vandalia, OH) and Frederic Clarke Putnam (associate professor of Bible and liberal studies, The Templeton Honors College at Eastern University) and edited by Miles V. Van Pelt (Alan Belcher Professor of OT and Biblical Languages at Reformed Theological Seminary). This is the newest addition to Zondervan’s popular Basics of … language series and makes a significant contribution, not only to the series, but also to the fields of discourse analysis, Hebrew exegesis, and Hebrew language pedagogy. Written as a textbook for upper-level Hebrew students, the book is groundbreaking in that it brings together these three fields in a way that is easy to understand and is useful for students and their teachers.

The front matter for the book includes acknowledgments, a general introduction by Van Pelt, abbreviations, a table of grammatical terms, and a bibliography. The authors then divide the book into two main sections, with Patton discussing Hebrew prose and Putnam covering Hebrew poetry. The Hebrew prose section begins with an introduction and a chapter that covers discourse analysis in general. These are followed by chapters on discourse markers in Hebrew, verbal sequences in narrative and non-narrative, placing non-verbal elements before a verb, and verbless clauses. Subsequently, the last two chapters of the first section walk the reader through the process of systematically applying discourse analysis to Hebrew prose, focusing on relationships between clauses and including examples and discussion. The Hebrew prose section ends with a summary chart of topics related to prose discourse analysis.

The Hebrew poetry section by Putnam is organized by his systematic approach to doing discourse analysis on poetic texts. After an introductory chapter, Putnam addresses the process of poetic discourse analysis through the following chapters/topics: Glossing and Parsing the Poem, Poetic Lines and Structure, Verbal Forms, Type of Clause, Syntax, Semantic Cohesion, and Logical Cohesion. For each stage of the process, Putnam includes charts and examples to demonstrate how to carry out the step addressed in that chapter. After presenting all the steps, the Hebrew poetry section ends with a conclusion, examples, and two appendices, one briefly addressing the difficult issues related to poetic meter in Hebrew and one addressing the differences between gloss, meaning, and translation. The book as a whole ends with three indices: Scripture, Subject, and Auth...