Narrative Art in Genesis: Specimens of Stylistic and Structural Analysis (Biblical Seminar)

'Narrative Art in Genesis' was remarkable for its uncompromising insistence on the analysis of the 'final form' of the text, and for the attempt at a total description of every level of organization, from the phoneme up.... [It] is a pleasure, because of the freshness of writing that transgresses unabashedly the conventions of academic discourse. from the Foreword by Francis Landy

Jan P. Fokkelman (Jakarta 1940) studied Semitic languages at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, and taught Hebrew and Aramaic from 1963-2001. After completing his book on Genesis, Fokkelman wrote a tetralogy of over 2400 pages entitled 'Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel' (Assen, 1981-1993). Between 1998 and 2004 he published a tetralogy called 'Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible'. It covers the entire Psalter and the forty poems in the book of Job, contains structural analyses of all the poems, and offers extensive accounts of pre-Masoretic syllables which prove that the poets themselves counted their syllables and applied many forms of numerical perfection on all text levels. For the public at large he wrote two introductory guides: 'Reading Biblical Narrative' (1999) and 'Reading Biblical Poetry' (2001).