This dissertation examines the life and work of the Jewish writer Uri-Nisn Gnesin (1879-1913). Living in Russia, using Yiddish in his daily life, and writing prose in Hebrew, Gnesin was part of a multicultural and multilingual generation, which was too assimilated to live the traditional life of its fathers, and yet, not able to break with it completely. For many Russian Jews, this dual identity, rarely recognized in modern scholarly discourse on Hebrew literature, resulted in psychological discomfort, feelings of guilt, and other traumas. Addressing this identity crisis, I show how the worldview of an assimilated Russian Jew is reflected in Gnesin’s Hebrew fiction. I offer an alternative view of Gnesin as a Jewish-Russian writer whose dual identity played a more complex role in his literary work and whose influence transcended a simple knowledge of languages or classic texts. It was not merely a language or a book, but the unique Jewish-Slavic atmosphere of small Eastern European towns that provided Gnesin with all the models necessary for thinking, feeling, and writing. In my study, I consider theories of canonization to demonstrate the reason why Gnesin has first and foremost been categorized as a Hebrew writer. Contemporary scholars of modern Hebrew fiction generally agree that Gnesin’s fiction is secular due to the non-Jewish associative infrastructure of his work. By exploring the historical and spiritual conditions of Gnesin’s generation, I attempt to overcome the limitations of such a view, which overemphasizes the role of language in his development as a writer. A functional analysis of Gnesin’s literary language maintains that although he found his best form of expression in literary Hebrew, it appeared mostly in the final stages of his writing. I propose that Gnesin and that whole generation of modern Hebrew writers used a special “hyper-language” consisting of three integral parts: a natively spoken language, a commonly spoken non-Jewish national language, and a written literary language. Ultimately, Gnesin appears to be a fin de siècle writer who used Hebrew language as a sophisticated tool to propagate his troubled Jewish-Russian experience. / text

This work looks at the rite presented in Deut 25:5–10 through a sociological framework. As such, it argues that ritual is a social act aimed at protecting communal interests over the interests of its individual members. More specifically, the rite described in Deut 25:5–10 was meant to act as a bulwark against infiltration of tribal land through exogamy. In later periods, it is argued that the focus of the rite narrowed to the priestly class. / text

Not available / text

The dissertation recounts the variegated journey of the sea in the Hebrew Bible through the lens of myth, metaphor, and muthos. The journey begins outside the Bible in ancient Near Eastern sea myths exemplified by the Ugaritic Baal Cycle and the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, which tell the story of a sea deity whose defeat in cosmic battle against a protagonist god precedes three goodly consequences: creation, kingship, and temple. The story continues with the analysis of the biblical presentation of creation, kingship, and temple with emphasis on the constellation of themes and characters of the sea myth. The dissertation next analyzes the use of the sea myth as a metaphor for three events on the plane of history: the exodus (Exodus 14-15), the Babylonian exile (Isaiah 40-55), and the eschaton (Isaiah 24-27 and Daniel 7). Finally, the discussion moves from the analysis of the ways in which the sea muthos functions as a metaphor for the biblical presentation of individual events to the examination of the role of the sea muthos as a metaphor for a biblical view of historical reality in toto. In sum, the dissertation extends the study of sea imagery in the Hebrew Bible from mythology to metaphorology and narratology to argue for the deep, enduring, and transformative place of the sea myth within biblical tradition. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

The first chapter of Mishnah tractate Sotah (m. Sot) records rabbinic elaboration and interpretation on the sotah ritual contained in the Hebrew Bible, Numbers 5:11-31. Specifically, the nine mishnayoth that compose m. Sot 1 discuss the circumstances for invoking the trial of the “bitter waters” and the overall treatment of the suspected wife during the trial. This paper argues that, when read together, m. Sot 1 describes an entire economy of justice and punishment that must be imposed on a wife who is merely suspected of adultery, quite apart from whether she is—or is not—guilty of adultery. Through a close reading of m. Sot 1 and by examining the current gender discourse surrounding this text, this paper maintains that the rabbis sought to justify and explain these aspects of the sotah ritual by elaborating their understanding of suspicion and drawing them under a larger conception of measure for measure justice.

The dissertation investigates syntactic and semantic aspects of the indefinite pronoun system in Modern Hebrew and consists of an experimental part and a theoretical part. The experimental part presents the grammaticality judgment task conducted to test three theoretical questions: (1) the relation between negation and the licensing of AF `any' and KOL `any'; (2) the contrast between EYZE `some' and EYZESEHU `some' in terms of specificity; and (3) the correlation between syntactic position and free choice readings. Three main theoretical findings are contributed by this work. First, it is shown that from a typological viewpoint, Hebrew, a Semitic language, patterns with Romance and Germanic languages, rather than Japanese-type languages, in having indefinite pronouns specialized for particular operators available in the discourse. Second, the thesis proposes a novel unified syntax-semantics for KOL which accounts for its interpretational variability. Working with the Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002) framework where indefinite pronouns generate sets of individual alternatives, the semantics of a KOL--modified noun phrase is formalized as a variable and containing a restriction. When this restriction ranges over kinds, KOL receives a generic reading; when the restriction is over a contextually specified set of entities, KOL has an episodic reading. In these cases, the KOL--phrase moves to the argument position of a universal quantifier which binds the individual alternatives generated by the KOL--phrase. If KOL stays in situ, the individual alternatives are allowed to expand into propositional alternatives, resulting in the free choice reading. Third, I discuss the DP-internal structure of [eyze(N)se-hu (N)] and [(N) kol(N)se-hu], treating 'se-hu' as a CP. I propose that there is a correlation between the postnominal position and the free choice readings of these pronouns, suggesting that domain restrictions, usually derived in the semantics-pragmatics, may also be encoded in the syntax. If this hypothesis is on the right track, it could provide us with a better understanding of how and when in the process of language acquisition domain restrictions found with indefinite pronouns are acquired.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-98).

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1988. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Robert Pace. Dissertation Committee: Harold Abeles. Bibliography: leaves 206-207.

Thesis (M.C.S.)--Regent College, Vancouver, B.C., 1998. / [Panim ʼel panim] appears in Hebrew letters on t.p. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-124).

Thesis (S.T.D.)--Concordia Seminary, 1994. / Includes Hebrew text of each Psalm with translation. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-229).