Psalm 24/Notes/Phrasal.vv. 1-2.588142

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v. 1 – The lamed preposition in the clause לַֽ֭יהוָה הָאָ֣רֶץ וּמְלוֹאָ֑הּ indicates possession, i.e., the earth and its fulness are to YHWH ➞ the earth and its fulness belong to YHWH. Although it is standard, both in Biblical Hebrew and cross-linguistically, for the possessum to appear first in a predicational possessive clause (sometimes called 'belong' possession, as opposed to presentational 'have' possession; Croft 2022, 305-307), the order is reversed here for the pragmatic function of exclusive focus: they belong only to YHWH (see our macrosyntactic analysis).