Expert: Gaddy Yaari - 7/10/2009

Question
In contrast to the general English sentence structure of subject verb, is it true that Hebrew sentence structure frequently places the word of emphasis first in the sentence structure? In Psalm 62, for instance, a number of the Hebrew sentences begin with the "alone." Does that mean that the Psalm writer is directly emphasizing that word? Thanks so much for any guidance.

Answer
Nathan,

Biblical Hebrew is quite different from modern Hebrew in many respects, including sentence structure. However, Psalms provides another reason: it is a book of poetry, and poems, by their nature, experiment with various sentence structures.

Gaddy