Focus Construction with kî ?im in Biblical Hebrew

This study uses modern linguistic theory to analyze a frequently recurring syntactic phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible that has thus far resisted explanation: כי אם.

The combination of the two particles כי and אם produces a construction that is notoriously difficult to describe, analyze syntactically, and translate. Dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew offer a dizzying variety of translations for this construction, including “that if,” “except,” “unless,” “but,” “but only,” and “surely,” among other...