A Textual and Intratextual Oriented Analysis of the Expression “יָכִ֖ל” in the Book of Daniel

Abstract

The expression “ל ִ֖ כָי “with its inflections, appears at least 13 times in the entire corpus of Daniel: 12 times in Aramaic and once in Hebrew.Its recurrence seems significant in light of scholarly debates that controvert Danielic literal structural, linguistic, single authorship, and textual unit. The unit of Daniel, for example, has largely been drawn from diverse thematic foci. Nevertheless, “There are both linguistic and thematic relations between the various sections of Daniel.”3 In addition, syntactical analysis, within the broad framework of text linguistics, is therefore necessary to establish this observation. While it is controverted, whether Yahweh is actively involved in the corpus of Daniel, it seems necessary to take a textual look at the expressions used by the author, and establish the meaning, unit,4 and intention of the book. The selected expression “ָל ִ֖ כָָי “considered from a textual and intra-textual perspective serves as an exemplar of this observation. Besides, it helps for a deeper understanding of the Danielic corpus.

Keywords

• syntactical
• intra-textual
• textual
• text linguistics