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home / docs / papers / Ancient Hebrew / Lip̄nē 'in the face of': A Locative Preposition with a Threatening Connotation

Lip̄nē 'in the face of': A Locative Preposition with a Threatening Connotation

What it is about

The complex preposition לִפְנֵי (lə + construct of פָּנִים "face") marks the third argument of נגף "defeat" ("Israel was defeated lip̄nē the Philistines", 1 Sam 4:2). Recent translations render it as an agent marker "by"; the author argues it stays locative, with a pragmatic connotation of threat, best put as "in the face of". Evidence: "face" expressions across languages and in Hebrew (מִפְּנֵי with fear and flight, עָמַד לִפְנֵי "serve") mark a dominant or threatening party; battle accounts follow a fixed seven-stage script (gather, move, prepare, fight, settle, final blow, aftermath) in which God, not the enemy army, is the agent of נגף; in all 48 uses of נגף the active-voice agent is almost always God and לִפְנֵי never marks God; לִפְנֵי also occurs with active נגף where the agent slot is already filled; and grammaticalisation theory predicts an agent marker would not be restricted to one verb. Older English "before" carried the same sense.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 is a head/relation rule in tools/macula (13-mova-tools.md, the relations section, and 08-syntax.md on prepositions and the passive). I2 is a candidate rule for tools/macula/src/prag.rs. I3 goes to 09-discourse.md (genres, narrative scripts) and to the world reader as an event frame. I4 is an entry fix in macula dict and 05-pronouns-particles.md (prepositions).

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs29582

@article{staps2022lip,
  title = {{Lip̄nē 'in the face of': A Locative Preposition with a Threatening Connotation}},
  author = {Staps, Camil},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 22},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs29582},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs29582}
}

References

36 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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