Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

ve-katav Washburn
>I'm a little surprised that nobody has mentioned the obvious chiasmus in 
>this verse.  It's
basically a textbook example.  F. I. Andersen suggested long ago that
the chiastic device is
used to show two sides of the same coin, so to speak: he called the
light "day;" on the flip
side, he called the darkness "night."  I suspect the difference
between him and Sailhamer is
that Andersen posits this force for all types of chiasmus, not just
wayyiqtol/qatal.>
>
 [and]
>
> It's called chiasmus because the pattern, when mapped on paper,
> looks like the Greek letter chi, i.e. an X shape.


but 'chiasmus' is not a function of syntax or grammar
and yiqtol/qatal is not chiasmus as will be clear below.

I would say that an  Andersenian analysis mis-applies a syntactic word
order function
(fronting something in front of the verb in this case)
to a rhetorical figure that does not exist here.
This is a parallelism but not a 'textbook chiasm', which would have been:
A   (B)  C  D
D'   C'  [ ]  A'.
(A textbook chiasm here produces the most questionable of readings,
see #4 below.)

Notice the order of the biblical text:

Gen 1:5 is vayyiqra  elohim   la-or   yom
                    ve-la-Hoshex   qAra   layla
A  B  C  D
C'     A'  D'
with the salient piece of both clauses coming at the end (D)
and with the second clause using a 'contextualizing constituent' (C')
[contextualizing constituent is commonly called 'topic' in linguistics, but
since a linguistic "marked topic" is a technical term and is not
necessarily the
topic of a sentence in plain English, I use a more transparent description
as a term. Other terms in the literature for "contextualizing constituent" are
"point of departure", "Pivot", and "Basis"],
In this case the fronting is for comparing/contrasting
light and darkness in order to communicate their distinctive names 'day' and
'night'.
The fronting,  of course, usually causes a non-vayyiqtol verb form 99.99%
(see Gen 22:4, Is 6:1 and Moabite Mesha for vayyiqtol examples after a
fronting [casus pendens]).

This should be contrasted with three to five other possible BH orders for the
second part:

1
vayyiqra  elohim     la-or       yom
ve-la-Hoshex       layla     qarA
A  B  C  D
C'     D'  A'
in which case the D' item yom becomes a syntactically-marked salient item,
which is another name for syntactic "Focus", while the C' item is again a
contextualizing constitutent as in the biblical text.
This is Good BH.
 PS: one might call this #1 a cleaner 'chiasm' by simplifying to
verb - adjunts, adjuncts - verb    A-B,B-A
but that, too, would obscure the actual functions of the word order placement.

and 2
vayyiqra   elohim   la-or   yom
vayyiqra   la-Hoshex   layla
A  B  C  D
A'      C'  D'
which is a repeated order where both C items have been placed after
the verb in a
demoted 'quiet spot' for highly pre-supposed information
leaving the D item to receive natural (default)  prominence as the
salient piece
of new information).
This is Good BH.

and 3
vayyiqra  elohim    la-or    yom
ve-layla   qarA   la-Hoshex
A  B  C  D
D'   A'  C'
which places the salient item before the verb in a marked Focus construction
without any marked contextualizing constituent (aka 'topic').)
This is rhetorically out of perspective for the items being discussed,
so 'acceptable BH', but not good.

and 4
vayyiqra  elohim     la-or       yom
ve-layla   la-Hoshex   qarA
A  B  C  D    D'  C'  A'
in which case the D' item becomes a syntactically marked salient item, which 
is
another name for syntactic "Focus",
but the C' item is again a contextualizing constitutent but in a position
where a Focus item should be.
Questionable/Stuttering BH.
PS: this, too, might be called a textbook chiasmus, but it is syntactically
and pragmatically flawed (in a functional grammar framework, or simply
'pragmatically' flawed in a generative framework).

and 5
The most unmarked/default order would have been
vayyiqra   elohim    yom     la-or
vayyiqra   layla    la-Hoshex
A  B  D  C    A'  D'  C'  (using the same Alphabet ciphers from the
original verse)
Insipid but good BH.

--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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