Unit Delimitation in Biblical Hebrew

Publisher Description

Series: Pericope 4 - Scripture as written and read in antiquity Bible scholars and translators are often confronted with the problem of sectioning biblical texts. Until recently sentence division and paragraphing were largely left to the imagination of the individual scholar. This resulted in a wide range of different divisions of one and the same text. There is, however, a lot of long neglected evidence on how the ancient scribes themselves understood the structure of the texts they were transmitting. Research in ancient scribal traditions shows that in the entire ancient Near East scribes provided their texts with special, structuring markers. For example, rulings, lines left open, extra large capitals, different colouring at the beginning of new passages, and for the division into smaller units, strokes, dots and spaces. Actually many markers lending structure to our modern texts appear to be derived from very ancient customs. This volume contains the papers read during the Third P