Sustained engagement with Ellen Van Wolde’s
recent monograph, Reframing Biblical Studies: When Language and Text Meet
Culture, Cognition, and Context (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009) is already
available online.
(1)
From
Pete Bekins, a careful review
for those interested in the application of cognitive linguistics to biblical
studies; in this sense, Van Wolde is a pioneer. For a review of a book that explores some of the same territory, Elizabeth
R. Hayes’s The Pragmatics of Perception and Cognition in MT Jeremiah 1:1-6:30:
A Cognitive Linguistics Approach [BZAW 380; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008], go here.
(2) With respect to a highly touted and controversial thesis contained in the monograph, see Bob Becking and Marjo C. A. Korpel, “To Create, to Separate or to Construct: An Alternative [to] a Recent Proposal as to the Interpretation of ברא in Gen 1:1-2:4,” JHS 10/3 (2010), online here [IMHO the basic conclusions of this article are sound, but the argumentation used to get there is of varying quality];
(3) Earlier discussion of ברא create vs. separate: Chris Heard, Joel Hoffman, and John Hobbins.
I would
emphasize that the overall quality of Ellen Van Wolde’s scholarship is at the
same level or higher as that all the authors just mentioned. Nonetheless, on the
specific question of the meaning of ברא, Van
Wolde’s proposal so far has been consistently dissed.
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