Visualisations
Analytic
Grammatical
The first visualisation should be to grasp the basic grammar of the Hebrew text, ensuring we've understood what's the subject, the verb, the object, etc. Sentence diagramming is a way of visually displaying all these grammatical relations.
The basics of those of Reed-Kellogg diagrams, modified by Hebrew:
- The nucleus of a clause is on one straight line, with the order subject-verb-object (but right-to-left!). In the example, there are no objects, only subjects (in a red box, with a placeholder for when a clause has no expressed subject) and verbs (in green boxes).
- Simple modifiers are placed beneath the words they modify, floating (as with the orange adjectives and blue adverbs)
- Prepositional phrase modifiers are placed beneath the words they modify, with a diagonal line (on which the preposition is written) and an attached straight line (on which the object of the preposition is written), as in the purple
- Construct chains are written as downward-stepping stair-steps, as in the yellow
- Compound subjects, verbs or clauses are represented by parallel lines that are connected by an angle bracket, as well as a dashed line if there are conjunctions (the grey waw conjunctions)
- Subordinate clauses are connected via a dashed line to the clause modified, with any connecting particles by the dashed lines (as with the relative particle in gray)
Synthetic
Cognitive
The cognitive visualisation lays out a map of mini-summaries for the Psalm. These will always be tentative until corroborated by similar patterns elsewhere. The big challenge here is not reading our own cultural expectations into the text. We will all do it, and our review cycles will hopefully identify and remove as much as is possible of our culture, leaving (and indeed discovering) that which was genuinely in the ancient Israelite culture.
The aim is to connect verbal sequences with cognitive sequences consistently, such that we can have confidence that we're understanding the Hebrew as it was intended to be understood. This means creating a map from verbal sequences (e.g. 'does not walk in the path of the wicked' to 'does meditate on the Torah') to the idea of providing a comprehensive set of instructions, from what should not happen to what should happen.
The proposed cognitive analyses must therefore be directly tied to the text, so that they can tested against the rest of the Old Testament.
