Tense in Biblical Hebrew? Franz Rosenzweig’s Concept of Time and its Grammatical Applications in the Biblical Commentary in Star of Redemption

In his core book, The Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig, a major German-Jewish philosopher and educator of the early XX century, attempts to combine elements of European (Christian) and Jewish patterns to portray them as connected ways to one God. His philosophical system includes a commentary on the texts of the Jewish Bible where he discovers grammatical forms known from the Latin and German grammars, such as past, present or future time. An eager student of Hebrew and a propagator of Jewish education, Rosenzweig does not intend to explain the biblical text from a strictly linguistic point of view. As a part of Rosenzweig’s philosophy, his evolution of grammatical categories combines Western forms and Jewish content to show the development of human personality on its way to meet God. This ambiguous grammar is an example of Western thought coming back to Jewish topics in order to become meaningful inside the messianic scheme.