Jacobus A Naudé

University of the Free State | ufs · Department of Hebrew

This volume is the result of the 2021 session of the Linguistics and the Biblical Text research group of the Institute for Biblical Research, which addresses the history, relevance, and prospects of broad theoretical linguistic frameworks in the field of biblical studies. Cognitive Linguistics, Functional Grammar, generative linguistics, historical...

University of Free State, Department of Hebrew, Undergraduate and Graduate programs

In this essay, we demonstrate that in addition to the Revised Standard Version and its revisions as part of the linear emergence of the Tyndale–King James Version tradition in the 20th and 21st centuries, there are also alternative revisions and retranslations of the King James Version (KJV) of 1611 as literal or word-for-word translations, which e...

In this essay, it is demonstrated that the inception of the English Bible tradition began with the oral–aural Bible in Old English translated from Latin incipient texts and emerged through a continuous tradition of revision and retranslation in interaction with contemporary social reality. Each subsequent translation achieved a more complex state b...

Revisions of the King James Version of 1611 continued into the 20th and 21st centuries as literal or word-for-word translations. This development corresponds with a new age in Bible translation that started in the second half of the 20th century, which involves at least six changes in the philosophy of Bible translation. Firstly, Bible translation...

In this chapter, we have described the emergence of linguistics and the ways in which a scientific approach to language offers significant advances over traditional philology in describing and explaining problematic linguistic states of affairs. We have summarized the basic contribution of generative grammar to the analysis of Septuagint Greek and...

A complexity approach to Qumran Hebrew recognises that language is a dynamic, adaptive, emergent system with complex interconnected components and subsystems. Language structure (langue) and linguistic expression (parole) are always in a state of disequilibrium, both synchronically (language variation) and diachronically (language change and diffus...

Left dislocation constructions involve a constituent that precedes the matrix sentence and is resumed within the sentence by a coreferential resumptive element. Cross-linguistically, left dislocation constructions exhibit considerable syntactic variation, which can be described on the basis of (1) the grammatical features of the resumptive element,...

The dominance of the King James Version (1611) began to fade in the late 19 th century, when its language became too remote from standard English, leading to various revisions in both Britain and the United States. However, numerous English translations that are independent of the King James Version tradition and its revisions also emerged, specifi...

The following typology is suggested for the intersection of religious texts and oral-written traditions: • religions with dominant written traditions, namely the monotheistic religions: the Jewish religion (0.2% globally), Christianity (32%) and Islam (23%) (Pew Research Center’s Forum 2012:9, 10, 12; see Religious translation*; Naudé 2018:389–395...

In linguistic terms, a quantifier is an item that appears with a noun to specify the number or amount of referents indicated by the noun. In English, various kinds of quantification are lexically differentiated—universal quantification (all), distributive quantification (each), and universal-distributive (every). In Greek, however, quantification i...

A live webinar on translation studies and its implications for Bible translation was held on 20 August 2020. The goal was to answer the question: What insights can Bible translation practitioners glean from the field of translation studies? It is argued that the contribution of translation studies to Bible translation cannot be ignored; instead, tr...

You can download the open-access PDF here: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1392 At some point the press will be adding PDFs of the individual articles. Left dislocation (as opposed to topicalisation) involves a constituent that occurs to the left of the sentence boundary and has resumption within the core sentence. Crosslinguistically,...

The way in which the academic study of Biblical Hebrew as a language should be conducted is contested. In light of the current debate and the engagement in this question of some of the articles in this issue (viz. Naudé & Miller-Naudé, Holmstedt, Robar, Hardy, Ehrensvärd, Rezetko, and Young, and Noonan), we provide in this article a summary of the...

In this paper, we explore arguments concerning the disciplinarity of linguistics and philology as fields of academic knowledge. We begin with a brief historical overview of philology and linguistics. We then consider the question of whether linguistics and philology in the twenty-first century should be viewed as separate disciplines or as overlapp...

The dominance of the King James Version (1611) began to fade in the late 19th century, when its language became too remote from standard English, leading to various revisions in both Britain and the United States. However, numerous English translations that are independent of the King James Version tradition and its revisions also emerged, specific...

Die eerste volledige vertaling van die Bybel in Afrikaans, 'n letterlike vertaling, word in 1933 gepubliseer ná die vorige pogings van die Bybelvertalingsbeweging (1872-1911) en 'n poging op kerklike aandrang (1916-1923). Daarna volg die volgende hervertalings, naamlik 'n dinamies-ekwivalente vertaling in 1983 en in 2007 Die Bybel vir Dowes, ook ui...

The Hebrew quantifier ‫כ‬ ‫ל‬ is used both as a universal quantifier (equivalent to English all) and as a distributive quantifier (equivalent to English each, every). In Qumran Hebrew, as in Biblical Hebrew, the quantifier ‫כ‬ ‫ל‬ occurs in four syntactic constructions depending upon the type of noun phrase that follows it in order to indicate nuan...

The Hebrew Bible mentions 12 precious stones arranged in four rows of three each on the high priest’s breastpiece in two lists (Ex 28:17–20 and 39:10–13). Nine of these precious stones reappear in the Tyrian king’s ‘covering’ in Ezekiel 28:13 in three groups of three. Although the two lists in Exodus are identical, the order in Ezekiel is slightly...

In the ancient world, precious stones (valuable stones and hard substances excluding gold, silver and copper) were distinguished in terms of appearance (beauty, colour), function (durability) and cost (rarity). As a result, there is considerable difficulty in determining how to correlate the inventory of lexical terms referring to precious stones i...

Translation is centrally important for religion in two ways. First, most religious communities encounter their sacred texts entirely through translations; and, second, religious texts as an object of study are usually read in translation by scholars of religion. The translation of sacred texts is problematic in terms of its nature (translation meth...

Apollonius Dyscolus (second century C.E.) defined the pronoun not merely as a noun substitute but implied that a pronoun may refer to nouns anaphorically. The study of Latin scarcely improved the knowledge of anaphora and pronouns and, for centuries, thinking about anaphora and pronouns was essentially limited to the activity of compiling inventori...

Left dislocation, right dislocation, topicalisation, and extraposition involve a constituent in a non-canonical position at the edges of the sentence. In Biblical Hebrew, the differentiation of these four constructions is complicated by two additional constructions. At the left edge of the sentence is a construction that is like topicalisation in t...

Draft of Chapter 15 by Jacobus A Naude and Cynthia L Miller-Naude "Theology and Ideology in the Metatexts of Bible Translation in Muslim Contexts: A Case Study" to be published on 27 June 2019 in "Ancient Texts and Modern readers. Studies in Ancient Hebrew Linguistics and Bible Translation" (edited by Gideon R Kotze, Christian S. Locatell, John A....

As you share it with friends and colleagues please inform them of the full title of the book from which it is extracted (see below). I’m also attaching an updated publication announcement. Please feel free to share this with anyone you feel might find it of interest. The Guide is currently available from xulonpress.com in the United States and will...

As you share it with friends and colleagues please inform them of the full title of the book from which it is extracted (see below). Please feel free to share this with anyone you feel might find it of interest. The Guide is currently available from xulonpress.com in the United States and will soon be available from Amazom.com and other online book...

As you share it with friends and colleagues please inform them of the full title of the book from which it is extracted (see below). Please feel free to share this with anyone you feel might find it of interest. The Guide is currently available from xulonpress.com in the United States and will soon be available from Amazom.com and other online book...

As you share it with friends and colleagues please inform them of the full title of the book from which it is extracted (see below). Please feel free to share this with anyone you feel might find it of interest. The Guide is currently available from xulonpress.com in the United States and will soon be available from Amazom.com and other online book...

As you share it with friends and colleagues please inform them of the full title of the book from which it is extracted (see below). Please feel free to share this with anyone you feel might find it of interest. The Guide is currently available from xulonpress.com in the United States and will soon be available from Amazom.com and other online book...

As you share it with friends and colleagues please inform them of the full title of the book from which it is extracted (see below). Please feel free to share this with anyone you feel might find it of interest. The Guide is currently available from xulonpress.com in the United States and will soon be available from Amazom.com and other online book...

As you share it with friends and colleagues please inform them of the full title of the book from which it is extracted (see below). Please feel free to share this with anyone you feel might find it of interest. The Guide is currently available from xulonpress.com in the United States and will soon be available from Amazom.com and other online book...

As you share it with friends and colleagues please inform them of the full title of the book from which it is extracted (see below). Please feel free to share this with anyone you feel might find it of interest. The Guide is currently available from xulonpress.com in the United States and will soon be available from Amazom.com and other online book...

As you share it with friends and colleagues please inform them of the full title of the book from which it is extracted: Noss, Philip A., and Charles S. Houser, eds. A Guide to Bible Translation: People, Languages, and Topics. Maitland, FL: Xulon Press; and Swindon, Eng.: United Bible Societies, 2019. The Guide is currently available from xulonpres...

Preprint of chapter published as Naude, J.A. & Miller-Naude, C.L. 2019. "Sacred Writings and Their Translations as Complex Phenomena. The Book of Ben Sira in the Septuagint as a Case in Point", in Kobus Marais & Reine Meylaerts (eds.). Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies. Methodological considerations. New York: Routledge. pp. 180-215 Sacre...

The concern of the paper is to highlight how computational analysis of Biblical Hebrew grammar can now be done in very sophisticated ways and with insightful results for exegesis. Three databases, namely, the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer (ETCBC) Database, the Accordance Hebrew Syntactic Database, and the Andersen-Forbes Syntactic Datab...

Although the Hebrew source text term אֶרֶז [cedar] is translated in the majority of cases as κέδρος [cedar] or its adjective κέδρινος in the Septuagint, there are cases where the following translations and strategies are used: (1) κυπάρισσος [cypress] or the related adjective κυπαρίσσινος, (2) ξύλον [wood, tree] and (3) non-translation and deletion...

In this paper we explore some of the implications of Marais (2014) concerning translation as an emergent phenomenon with respect to the translation of sacred writings within, by and for religious communities. The translation of sacred writings provides a particularly fertile field for the exploration of translation as an emergent phenomenon in ligh...

Although the Hebrew source text term ארֶֶז [cedar] is translated in the majority of cases as κέδρος [cedar] or its adjective κέδρινος in the Septuagint, there are cases where the following translations and strategies are used: (1) κυπάρισσος [cypress] or the related adjective κυπαρίσσινος, (2) ξύλον [wood, tree] and (3) non-translation and deletion...

Botanical terms in the Septuagint reveal a mass of uncertain and sometimes contradictory data, owing to the translators’ inadequate and inaccurate understanding of plants. To understand the metaphorical and symbolic meaning of plants, the new approach represented by Biblical Plant Hermeneutics places the taxonomy of flora on a strong ethnological a...

The translation of the oral aspects of the biblical text for oral audiences has been described as translation from orality to orality (Maxey 2009). In other words, the oral features of the source text are represented as oral features in the target text. In actual practice, however, the translational situation involved in oral Bible translation is...

This is a preprint of a paper published as follows: Naude, J.A. & Miller-Naude, C.L. 2019. "Sacred writings", in Kelly Washbourne & Ben Van Wyke, The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, New york: Routledge. pp.181-205. Sacred writings, which are writings beyond everyday life that inspire awe, respect and even fear, are associated with reli...

In this paper we survey the evolution of Biblical Hebrew Linguistics in South Africa during the last six decades—its dependence upon and contribution to European and American developments and its distinct contributions to the field. Three eras can be distinguished. In the first era, the study of Biblical Hebrew in South Africa was primarily philolo...

Religious translation is a critical category in religious studies for understanding the historical diffusion of religion, for interreligious dialogue and for the comparative study of religion (DeJonge and Tietz 2015: 1–12). Most texts that perpetuate religion as an object of study are translations. The need is that theoretical approaches from trans...

The Bible contains numerous features of alterity (aspects which reflect its “otherness” to modern readers) which are compounded by its cultural and generic diversity. Here, we examine alterity in Bible translation through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of the Other, which he viewed as an equal rather than an inferior, and his insistence tha...

In translating the Bible, a collection of sacred writings originating in the ancient Near East and spanning half a millennium, the cultural dimensions of these texts play a central role. Nord has observed that there are “rich points of culture” (Nord 1997:24-25), that is, cultural dimensions that are particularly important indicators of culture. Ne...

The so-called tripartite verbless clause in Biblical Hebrew consists of two nominal phrases and a pronominal element. Three analyses of the pronominal element have been advanced, each with implications for understanding the structure of the sentence. A first approach has been to view the pronominal element as a copular constituent, which serves onl...

In this paper, we explore the arguments concerning the disciplinarity of linguistics and philology as fields of academic knowledge. We begin with a brief historical overview of philology and linguistics. We then consider the question of whether linguistics and philology in the twenty-first century should be viewed as separate disciplines, as overla...

Metatexts are supplementary materials provided by translators to “frame” the translation in order to guide readers’ interpretation of the texts. Metatexts are especially important for sacred texts which are translated (or published) specifically for individuals who are not members (or not originally members) of the religious group in question. Inst...

This new and fully revised edition of the A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar serves as a user-friendly and up-to-date source of information on the morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of Biblical Hebrew verbs, nouns and other word classes (prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, modal words, negatives, focus particles, discourse markers, inte...

"Published in Advances in Biblical Hebrew Linguistics. Data, Methods, and Analyses, edited by Adina Moshavi and Tania Notarius, Winona Lake, Indiana, 2017, copyright © 2017 by Eisenbrauns; placed here by permission of the publisher. Book may be purchased here: www.eisenbrauns.com"

The question of grammatical categories and how to determine them is an ancient one. Panini divided Sanskrit into four categories based upon inflection: nouns and verbs are inflected, whereas prepositions and particles are uninflected. Dionysius Thrax (2nd century B.C.E.) divided words into eight categories based upon both inflection and meaning: no...

In order to understand precisely what students are focusing on when they read Biblical Hebrew, we have employed eye-tracking technology. Eye-tracking technology allows researchers to see exactly what students are focusing on when they read Biblical Hebrew—for example, how long they look at an orthographic feature or whether their eyes regress to a...

The question of diachronic change in Biblical Hebrew has been extensivelyexamined in recent years. This article has two parts. First, it reviews the currentstate of the debate in light of a special session devoted to the topic at the Societyof Biblical Hebrew and National Association of Professors of Hebrew in 2015.Special attention is given to the...

One of the central metaphors in the New Testament involves the familial imagery of God as “father” and Jesus as God’s “son.” The epithet of “son of God” for Jesus is understood by Christians to be metaphorical, rather than literal, and evokes a complex network of theological concepts. However, for Muslims, these epithets for God are extremely probl...

The Bible was composed both by way of oral tradition and by scribal activity. Various descriptions exist of the development and relationship of the dominant forms of orality and scribal tradition throughout the history of media culture. Utilising the insights of, and debate on, the field of Biblical Performance Criticism, this article argues for an...

The adjective is a beleaguered category in biblical Hebrew grammar with many grammars of biblical Hebrew denying that the adjective is a category distinct from substantives. Within a variety of linguistic theories, the status of the adjective as a grammatical category is also debated. Cross-linguistically adjectives exhibit extraordinary variety: i...

The research in this paper forms one part of a body of research on the metatexts of Bible translations. This research began by exploring the role of metatexts in various translations, in general, and the Aristeas Letter as a metatext of the Septuagint, in particular (Naudé 2009, 2012). Then the various metatexts of the King James Version of 1611 we...

In this article we examine how Qumran Hebrew can contribute to our knowledge of historical Hebrew linguistics. The premise of this paper is that Qumran Hebrew reflects a distinct stage in the development of Hebrew which sets it apart from Biblical Hebrew. It is further assumed that these unique features are able to assist us to understand the natur...

Dialogue intersects with “style” in multiple ways, including the following: in the particular speech style (idiolect) of each participant in the dialogue, in the genres or registers of speech and dialogue and, finally, in the conventions and norms that emerge and are exploited (or flouted) in the process of verbal interaction within a dialogic exch...

In recounting or representing speech, both oral storyteller and literary narrator have at their disposal similar interpretive choices in how to represent it, ranging from mimesis to paraphrase to a simple notice that speech occurred. Most commonly, these metapragmatic comments take the shape of quotative frames, which introduce the represented spee...

This paper focuses on the description and explanation of the syntactic status, distribution, and scope of the quantifier כל in Qumran Hebrew, that is, the Hebrew of the Qumran collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls. First, it will be shown that the quantifier ordinarily exhibits many syntactic features that are similar to Biblical Hebrew with respect t...

This article explores the relationship between the orality of the Old Testament as a source text and orality as a feature of the target culture. This relationship involves both alterity, the assertion of distance of culture, and similarity (or familiarity), the assertion of proximity of culture (Sturge 2007). However, because orality does not invol...

The physical placement of Maccabees within translations provides important evidence concerning the translators’ views of the book and its relation to other parts of the canon. Some of the translations include a preface which explicitly indicates the status of Maccabees with respect to the remainder of the canon of Scripture and its proper use both...

Reading involves a cluster of complex cognitive skills, and, as a result, the teaching of reading can best be approached through a complex systems approach. This is especially the case in South Africa, where teaching and learning is further complicated by the multicultural context as well as by an educational system based on Outcomes Based Learning...

The new field of Biblical Performance Criticism recognises ancient Israel and the early church as predominantly oral cultures. The traditions now in the Bible were originally experienced as oral performances. The claim is made that academic work on the Bible must shift from the mentality of a modern print culture to that of an oral/scribal culture...

Modern language instruction always includes a cultural component – students do not learn just isolated words, morphology and syntax, but rather the cultural context of the language and its speakers. The teaching of Biblical Hebrew, however, has usually taken place in a cultural vacuum without reference to the cultural concepts that permeated ancien...

Translations of sacred texts have often been accompanied by metatexts, which function to guide the reader in interpreting the text. The King James Version as it was originally published in 1611 included various kinds of metatexts. This paper examines three metatexts—two metatexts consisting of the two prefaces found in the preliminaries, and the se...

One of the heated debates within Christian circles currently involves the translation of "divine familial terms" in Bible translations intended for Muslim audiences. On one side of the debate are those who claim that the metaphor "son of God" can legitimately be translated in an alternative way for Muslim audiences because of its offensive nature t...

This article develops a theory of language change and diffusion in the light of new developments in contemporary linguistics on the themes of language evolution and the rise of linguistic complexity. The core assumptions of this article are, first, the fact that a language inevitably changes and diffuses over time and, second, a language inherently...

Translators defend themselves and their translations by utilising metatexts, which narrate the nature of the specific translation. This paper will argue that metatexts serve to reframe aspects of religious conflict, and hence they participate in the construction of social reality and identity. The hypothesis to be investigated in this paper is that...

This article examines how the translators of the King James Bible (1611) appropriated much of the wording from the prior tradition of the Bible in English (especially the Tyndale New Testament of 1526, the Coverdale Bible of 1535, the Matthew’s Bible of 1537, the Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1539, and the Bishops’ Bible of 1568), but al...

The goal of this essay is to continue developing a theory of language change and diffusion (Naudé 2000a; 2000b; 2003; 2010) in the light of recent developments in contemporary linguistics. The study of diachrony and language change in Biblical Hebrew cannot be separated from new developments in contemporary diachronic linguistics (Fischer 2007), th...

The basic premise of a teaching grammar (as opposed to a descriptive grammar or a prescriptive grammar) is that it must describe the grammar to be learned in terms of the grammar of the language known by the student. In this regard, Biblical Hebrew teaching grammars are woefully inadequate for non-Western students, since they teach the grammatical...

Traditional accounts of the quantifier kol in Biblical Hebrew do not describe or explain its status, syntactic distribution or scope adequately. Current research within both formal and functional approaches to universal quantifiers is of interest to Biblical Hebrew grammar. Both approaches use formal representations to describe quantifiers. These r...

Translation in the African context is mainly associated with religious translation, especially the Bible but also the Qur’ān. In this paper, selected aspects of the translation of the Bible and the Qur’ān, each a vast field in itself, are used to illustrate the colonial and postcolonial encounters with the indigenous. Religious translation practice...

Since the 1980s, discourses about translation have broadened steadily. Beginning with a discussion of the name and content of the discipline, an overview of some translation approaches focusing on the source text, the process of translation, the reception of the translated text, and the culturally and socially bound character of translation are off...

The first complete Bible translation in Afrikaans was published in 1933. This article focuses on describing and analysing this translation. Given new developments in translation studies, one should not evaluate a translation normatively but rather describe it. Any new translation constructs a domesticated representation of a foreign text and cultur...

The quantifier kōl may appear after the constituent with which it is associated, in which case it obligatorily hosts a resumptive pronoun. The constituents are inter alia clausal subjects, direct objects of the verb, objects of subcategorized prepositions, objects of adjunct prepositions, and vocatives. This paper will focus on two important syntac...

argues that the language of Samuel-Kings represents a typologically older Hebrew than the language of Chronicles. To demonstrate that the typological difference reflects a genuine chronological difference, Hurvitz relies on externally dated evidence for the Hebrew language. Many scholars believe linguistic evidence precludes any attempt to date bib...