Hendiadys in the Hebrew Bible. An Investigation of the Applications of the Term

Abstract

It is evident that the term hendiadys, which is derived from the classical rhetorical tradition, has for hundreds of years been frequently applied to constructions and combinations of components in the Hebrew Bible. This study investigates on which constructions and components in the Hebrew Bible that the term hendiadys is applied to, and hence which phenomena that prompt the use of the term. For that purpose a large amount of examples of suggested and suspected so-called hendiadyses in the Hebrew Bible have been collected. The examples are derived from a variety of sources based on or involved in linguistic or exegetical investigations of the Hebrew Bible and biblical Hebrew, i.e., lexicons, dictionaries, grammars, monographs, articles, etc. The examples which are derived from all biblical books and genres have been analyzed and categorized, and through the morpho-syntactic and semantic analysis a large number of various categories and subcategories have been deduced. The result clearly shows that the term hendiadys already in antiquity was used for various constructions, and that it it is applied to an profuse amount of combinations of all kinds found in the Hebrew Bible. It is regularly used for different phenomena and there is no agreement in definitions or applications, as to which construction(s) the term ought to be applied to or which function(s) these syntagms represent. There are more suitable and specific terms available for the constructions involved, and instead of the term being a precise exegetical, grammatical or semantic instrument, the applications point to the existence of diverse phenomena in need of research. By looking beyond similarities with rhetorical figures in the classical tradition it has been discovered through this investigation that the largest category identified in the analysis consists of peculiar combinations of nouns that seem to require reinterpretations and that they occur most frequently in what is formulated as direct discourse in the Hebrew Bible.