What Can I Say? Implications and Communicative Functions of Rhetorical “WH” Questions in Classical Biblical Hebrew Prose

Abstract

The rhetorical question is a sentence whose meaning is that of a question, but which is used to indirectly express an assertion. This paper examines content ("WH") rhetorical questions in classical biblical prose, classifying them according to implications and communicative goals. Rhetorical questions have one of three types of implications: negative, specific, and extreme scalar implications. The content rhetorical question is found to be a versatile conversational device in the Bible, serving a variety of distinct communicative functions which operate on multiple levels. It is directly or indirectly connected to persuasion in most of its uses. The rhetorical question is in essence an intensifier, deriving its force on the higher-level of function from the implication of obviousness. In some cases, however, the choice of a persuasive form of communication rather than a more direct strategy has the effect of mitigation on the superordinate function level.

The ‘Slave’ Is the ‘Master’: Jacob's Servile Language to Esau in Genesis 33.1-17

“…Esau's] face is like seeing the face of God' ( ), which is a use of another positive politeness strategy-'exaggerate interest to H'. Despite the clear allusion to the incident at Peniel (32.23-31 [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]), Jacob atters Esau. As a character, Esau does not know about Jacob's wrestling with God.…”

“…14 What then is Jacob doing with his language in Gen. 33.1-17? This study proposes, with reference to the wider narrative (Gen. [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] and also with some reference to the larger biblical intertext and historical considerations, that Jacob is simply being polite to his brother. Yet, by being polite, he gets what he wants from Esau.…”

In the beginning there was conversation

“…Several common grammatical constructions are prototypically used to introduce fictive direct speech. This is also the case for another fictive interaction construction, namely non-information-seeking questions (Pascual 2014, 29-57, 169-188), such as leading and rhetorical questions, which are overwhelmingly common in the Hebrew Bible (some three quarters of the corpus examined in Moshavi 2013, andsee Moshavi 2010). This further evidences that the deictic frame of face-to-face conversation, characterized by the expression of perspective as directly linked to the conversational ground, and by sequential viewpoint shift between interactants (but see Vandelanotte, and van Duijn and Verhagen, this issue, for non-sequential, mixed-perspective constructions), was one of the earliest and most productive templates for linguistically conceptualizing and expressing human experience (e.g.…”

Superfluous Negation in Modern Hebrew and Its Origins

“…Sentence (8) is a 1904 example of Super Neg in a past tense free relative. .much that-NEG longed.1SG to.be time one in.the-congress ve-lirʔ ot et yocro and-to.see ACC his.creator 'And however much I wanted to attend the [Zionist] Congress once and see its creator [...]' (Be-ʕ olam Ha-ʔ otiyot Ha-maxkimot, I. L. Peretz, 1904)19 An anonymous reviewer correctly points out that Modern Hebrew does have occurrences of 'only' FRs of Non-questioning uses of interrogatives are well attested in Biblical, Rabbinic, and Medieval Hebrew(Moshavi 2013(Moshavi , 2014Stadel 2013;Gryczan 2013), as is the specific use of interrogatives to express exclamation (e.g., with ‫מה‬ ma 'what' in biblical Hebrew; Moshavi 2013). These examples do not contain superfluous negation, however, and therefore the MH construction seems not to have been inherited from these earlier varieties.20 Our searches reveal many examples in Hebrew literature already in the 19th century, with ‫לא‬ ‫מי‬ mi lo Despite the superficial similarity between the two constructions, this type of Super Neg also seems to have emerged somewhat earlier than the FR type Eilam (2008Eilam ( , 2009.…”