The inner object in biblical Hebrew: Aspects in its description and approaches to its interpretation

This paper deals with the inner object in biblical Hebrew, as in ('There were they in great fear' - Psalms 53:6). The inner object is a part of a sentence which resembles the form of a direct object, but functions semantically as an adverbial of manner; it is usually made up of a verbal noun and an attribute, the noun is derived from the root of the verb and does not add any lexical information to the verb, and the attribute next to it provides most of the information. Part 2 of the paper presents a number of aspects for the completion of the description of the inner object in biblical Hebrew: The form of the inner object and its components, the prevalent nouns as heads of the inner object, the prevalent verbs that accompany it, its distribution in the Bible, its appearance in certain contexts, types of contexts, and the appearance of the verbs that accompany the inner object in other structures. Part 3 of the paper presents two interpretive approaches to the use of the inner object in biblical Hebrew: The approach of Radak and that of Malbim, which express the opposing interpretations in regard to the different phenomena of doubling in the Bible.