Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Dave:

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 8:26 PM, Dave Washburn 
<davidlwashburn AT gmail.com>wrote:

> Thanks. It's a principle that I've tried to preach for a long time, and
> it's the reason why I do my very best to avoid poetic texts when trying to
> sort out Hebrew syntax. Of course, it reduces my corpus for syntactic study
> of biblical Hebrew by more than half, but everything in life is a
> trade-off!
>
> But even in poetry, Biblical Hebrew language still follows certain
rules—each phrase has a subject, either explicit or implicit from an
earlier phrase; verb either explicit or implicit from an earlier phrase
which agrees in number and gender with the subject; and object where
applicable. Adjectives and adverbs agree in gender and number with the
appropriate nouns and verbs.

It seems as if the Masoretic points are more often wrong in poetry than in
prose.

Where poetry most differs from prose is in word order—the word order in
poetry is often in rhythms and patterns while in prose the word order tends
to follow order of importance of what is being said.

Karl W. Randolph.