Monday, August 28, 2023

Francis I. Andersen on Dream Reports in the Hebrew Bible

  

DREAM REPORTS

 

The implication of visual experience comes to the fore in the description of dreams. An element of the marvellous is also present, of course. The narrative ingredient is not well developed in the dreams reported in Genesis. There is usually only one event clause; all the other information is supplied by means of wĕhinnē clauses, which may accumulate into quite a string. Otherwise they occur one at a time.

 

So Jacob's dream begins with three wĕhinnē clauses, with God's speech as the dream event (Ge 2812-15). Each clause has the structure wĕhinnē +S:N +P:PtPh. The dream in Ge 3110 begins in the same way. The dreams in the Joseph story are particularly impressive in this regard. The dream of the sheaves has three wĕhinnē clauses followed by the event clause (Ge 376-7). The speech even begins with wĕhinnē. The third clause is the only instance in the entire Bible of hinne followed by an imperfect verb. The dream report in Ge 379 consists of one hinnē clause and one wĕhinnē clause. Compare the single wĕhinnē clause in the vision of Ge 154. The butler's dream consists of one wĕhinnē clause followed by a string of four circumstantial clauses which set the scene. This is followed by three event clauses.

 

Then I picked the grapes.

And I squeezed them into Pharoah's cup,

And I put the cup on Pharoah's palm.

 

In contrast to this the baker's dream consists of circumstances only -- one wĕhinnē clause plus two circumstantial clauses. There is no event. In Pharoah's first dream (the cows) there are three wĕhinnē clauses (with participles). The only event is the skinny cows eating the fat ones (411-4). The second dream (the wheat) consists of two wĕhinnē +S:N +P:PtPh clauses plus the event clause in which the shrivelled wheat devours the plump wheat (415-7). Pharoah's reports repeat the patterns, except that the first is embellished with some comments of his own (Ge 4117-24). The abundant use of wĕhinnē clauses is thus a feature of dream reports in classical Hebrew. (Francis I. Andersen, The Sentence in Biblical Hebrew [Janua Linguarum Studia Memoriae Nicolai Van Wijk Dedicata, Series Practica 231; The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1974], 95)