Waltke & O’Connor’s Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax: thorough and extensive corrections

Edit: please allow 48 hours from the time of posting here for the update to appear in “Check for Updates” on your device.

This update is from version 3.4 to version 4.0. I skipped intervening version number increments because this update contains extensive corrections of all sorts intended to align this module with the print version.

Here is a list of fixes based on errors, omissions and inconsistencies that I identified, not listing “under-the-hood fixes”.

• A handful of paragraphs were cut-off midway.
• Some paragraph divisions were missing, especially so with indented paragraphs. All paragraphs that are quotations are now properly formatted with smaller font, indentation, and spacing above and below.
• All extraneous new lines between paragraphs were removed, in conformity with the print book. Users of this module can add spacing between paragraphs in the display settings, as with all modules.
• I added or reformatted all chapter tables of contents before each chapter and each major section to conform the module with the print book.
• I removed or added italics all over the place to conform the module to the PDF.
• I moved many words to the transliteration field. All Arabic, Akkadian, Hebrew, Ugaritic and Aramaic transliterations should be in the transliteration field, as well as Hebrew grammatical terms. The only exception I made was for Hebrew grammatical terms that occur in the Titles so that those could be easily searchable.
• I linked all references to chapters and sub-sections within chapters.
• A couple of page numbers were missing or were slightly misplaced.
• In a handful of places, the most recent printing of the book had corrections from the publisher which were not reflected in our module. These changes were integrated where I was able to spot them.
• I corrected the placement of the Oleh symbol (the Masoretic accent that looks like a lesser-than symbol “<”) countless times. This symbol was used by the authors to indicate the emphasized/accent syllable when it was not the final syllable in a word, such as with segholate nouns. See pages xii-xiii, (this is one of the paragraphs that was cut off). In many cases the Oleh mark was missing, in other cases it was present when it shouldn’t have been. Most instances of the Dehi in the MT apparently caused confusion with whoever prepared the print book’s Hebrew texts. The Dehi is a prepositive accent in the Sifrei Emet and it does not indicate the accent/emphasized syllable, so this resulted in falsely marked syllables. Cases where the Oleh mark was missing were almost always cases where a postpositive accent (Zarqa, Pashta, Segolta) was used in MT, but the correct identification of the accented syllable is known from morphology and comparison with identical or similar words.
• I laid out poetic passages with poetic line breaks, in conformity with the print book.
• I pushed all instances of the furtive Patah to the right of the letter to get that furtive Patah look.
• Tagged a couple of references to the NT.
• Tagged references to the Anchor, Hermeneia and Word Biblical commentaries.
• Removed tagging pointing to the Joüon and Muraoka Hebrew Grammar, since they are pointing to an older edition. In many instances, the section number appears to be the same, but there are two editions between the grammar they are referring to and the module we have, so it is wrong to link to our module.
• I fixed the paragraph formatting for the Hebrew examples and lists with Hebrew words so that the visual layout of those lists, tables, and examples is clearer.

I corrected all Hebrew errors:

• Missing vowels
• Vowels on words that were printed without vowels
• Wrong vowels
• Correct vowels that clashed with other vowels or were otherwise misplaced on their letter
• Correct vowels misplaced onto the preceding letter.
• Missing Atnah (this, along with Sop Pasuq is the only Masoretic accent used in the print book)
• Other Masoretic accents were erroneously included.
• Silluq where there should have been an Atnah
• Tav where there should have been a tet. There were hundreds of instances, including with the paradigmatic קטל!
• Missing text
• Out-of-order text. This occurred in two situations: where the print book had Hebrew that wrapped around to a new line within an English paragraph and where the print book had a Hebrew example that covered more than one verse.
• Many cases of Ayin where there should have been Aleph. A few instances of the reverse.
• Dagesh was erroneously placed after all instances of Maqqep.
• Missing Dagesh
• Shin and Sin were sometimes interchanged, especially if that letter had a Holem vowel in the print book, which was often missing. There were also instances of a dotless S(h)in which should not have been dotless.
• Holem was not visible on Sin or on Shin when the Holem belonged to a preceding Lamed.

After I made these extensive corrections, I looked at the reported corrections for this module. Previous updates to the module incorporated user-reported corrections but didn’t look for any patterns beyond the individual misspelled words or missing hyperlinks. According to the product page, this module was originally released in 2008. Due to its age and the nature of the errors I saw, it seems that this module was originally OCR’ed from a PDF and then we converted the Hebrew from whatever encoding it was in originally into our own encoding/font. In any case, the result was that much of the Hebrew text was of poor quality which is a shame because this is such an excellent title. 

So I am happy to report that all of these things have been fixed. This title is a very important work because it takes the Hebrew student well beyond the simplifications (and sometimes falsehoods) of first-year Hebrew grammars and into the findings of modern linguistic study. Personally, the major section on Hebrew verbal stems (a.k.a. binyanim), chapters 20 through 28, greatly helped my study of Biblical Hebrew. It is difficult to find a common/base meaning for each verbal stem and the semantic differences between the verbal stems are often obscured in English translation and in lexicons. So Waltke and O’Connor’s presentation there is very helpful.

Note that the update will offset the paragraph numbering because I had to delete/add paragraphs so it will displace any user highlighting and therefore make it useless.

If you use this module, look out for any Hebrew errors I may have missed. Also look out for typos in the English. The OCR process usually results in incorrect letters and incorrect word divisions and as I skimmed this module for Hebrew errors I was not actively reading the English so there may still be errors in the module.

I have also reported a few corrections to the publisher:

On page 99 of An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax in paragraph 6.3.1c. The words

la vigi ‘the night watchman.’

should in fact read

la vigie ‘the lookout.’

I incorporated this correction to version 4.0.

On page 570 in paragraph 34.3d, example #23 is erroneous. That section (34.3) deals with different uses/contexts of the jussive verb form, but example 23 on page 570 contains a negative imperative ואל תתנהו. The jussive, by the authors’ own definition (cf. § 34.1b), is only used in the third person, and this is clearly a second person negative imperative. Some grammars do classify this form morphologically as a “second-person jussive”, see the Joüon and Muraoka A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, revised English edition (2006) §114g and that may be why they accidentally included it here. Even their translation shows that they understood this verb to be in the third person, so their translation is incorrect. “and may he not surrender him” should in fact be: “and do not surrender him”. Unfortunately, there is no correction for me to make here, since that would require the author to provide an alternative example, so I left the module as it is.

Finally, on page 596 in paragraph 35.5.2d, example #16 is incomplete. That section concerns when an infinitive absolute is bound with a vav into a sequence of conjugated verbs. In the case of example #16, it is in a chain of jussives. As it was in the printed book, the example did not contain an infinitive absolute, but the context clearly shows one at the end of the second verse cited (Esther 2:3). So I simply lengthened the citation both in Hebrew and in translation unto the end of the verse, omitting words that aren’t necessary to illustrate the point at hand, as the authors do regularly. The example passage chosen is correct, it was simply cut off before the infinitive absolute.