Prof. W. Randall Garr

University of California

Prof. W. Randall Garr is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, and his research focuses on Northwest Semitic languages, the Hebrew Bible, and the ancient Near East. He is the author of Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000–586 B.C.E. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) and In His Own Image and Likeness: Humanity, Divinity, and Monotheism (Brill, 2003), co-editor, with Steven E. Fassberg, of A Handbook of Biblical Hebrew (2 vols.; Eisenbrauns, 2016), and author of the introduction to the 1998 reprint of S. R. Driver’s A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew.

Articles by Author

Why Say It Twice? Double Verbs in Biblical Speech

When YHWH tells Moses that whoever works on Shabbat shall be put to death, he doubles the verb; when Moses relays the law to the people, he uses a single verb. In Eden, YHWH warns the man that he will “die, yes, die,” the woman repeats the warning as “lest you die,” without repeating the verb, and the snake doubles it back: “Die, you will not die!” What is the significance of the added verb and what is lost when a speaker drops it?

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