NEH-BSF: A New Comprehensive Grammar of Late Biblical Hebrew

FAIN: RZ-310659-26

President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3846)
Vladimir Olivero (Project Director: November 2025 to October 2026)
Julia Rhyder (Project Director: October 2026 to present)

Planning the development of an updated grammar of Late Biblical Hebrew (587– 200 BCE). (12 months)

The objective of this project is to prepare a comprehensive, exhaustive, and up-to-date description of Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) in all its linguistic aspects. Despite the great significance of LBH as a key to reconstructing the linguistic history of ancient Hebrew through its various periods, as well as to understanding the historical and intellectual development of the biblical era, the vast body of research accumulated over the past two centuries has never been synthesized into a coherent and comprehensive description that could serve as a full grammar of Late Biblical Hebrew. Moreover, many linguistic features that characterize this corpus remain to be discovered and analyzed. The full proposed project aims to produce an updated and integrative grammar of LBH, combining well-known phenomena previously identified by scholars with new features to be uncovered through a systematic study of the LBH texts.