The Designation of the Individual: Expressive Usage in Biblical Narrative: 14

This book studies the way in which the narrator in the Books of Judges, Samuel and Kings uses names, other nominals, or pronouns to refer to his characters, and the way those characters use them to address or refer to each other. On the synchronic level of the study, the usage shown is self-consistent, and follows patterns similar to those characteristic of the corresponding features in spoken languages. Spoken usage is governed by conventions, but these can be manipulated so that the designation used express the attitudes and feelings of a speaker or narrator. The same is true of the usage of the corpus. The book provides a detailed description of this usage. After discussing the use of designations in general, the book describes the way nominal designations are used for kings, priests, prophets, and others; variation in the grammatical number of pronouns; deferential speech and variation in person; and other situations in which nominals are used to represent speaker or addressee. The intention of the survey is to show how the choice of designation may be used to specify the role in which a character is seen, to mark levels of politeness, or to show the relative importance of the material to the speaker or narrator, Designations thus reflect the viewpoint and attitudes of the narrator, or those he ascribes to the characters he portrays, information of great interest for interpretation.

E. John Revell has been a member of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Victoria College in the University of Toronto since 1962.