A Festschrift is much like a bouquet of flowers: a collection of carefully selected and freshly picked flowers, artfully arranged and hand-tied, and offered on a special occasion to a person one wishes to celebrate or honor.

With the present bouquet, we wish to honor our dear colleague and teacher Ellen van Wolde on the occasion of her retirement as Professor of Source Texts of Judaism and Exegesis of the Old Testament at the Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. But even more we wish to celebrate the significant influence of her academic work on the field of biblical studies, her ongoing contribution to scholarship, and the lasting inspiration that she is to so many of her students and colleagues. Reasons enough for us to approach her closest colleagues and academic friends with the request to contribute to this bouquet with some home-grown and freshly cut flowers, a request that was met with great enthusiasm, as the present volume demonstrates. Even though all contributors know Ellen long and well enough to know exactly which scholarly flowers she prefers, we suggested that they would select flowers growing in the different fields in which the recipient of this Festschrift has also spent most of her academic life. The contributions in this volume thus come from the three main fields that have defined Ellen van Wolde’s career: studies in the book of Genesis, studies in the book of Job, and Hebrew linguistics. In this way, this Festschrift has become a variegated yet harmonious bouquet, which, we hope, will delight the honoree.

Of course, no bouquet could fully do justice to this festive occasion. Not so much because offering flowers to a Dutch scholar might seem like carrying owls to Athens. Rather, how could a bouquet—etymologically ‘a small grove, a small wood’—be a suitable gift to a scholar whose last name van Wolde evokes a vast forest? Compared to the expanse, the richness and abundance of the honoree’s career, this collection is a mere bouquet indeed. Yet, we hope she may enjoy it as a fine selection of academic contributions, in many ways inspired by her own work, and as an anthology—in the truest sense of the word—of the finest flowers that are grown in her fields of expertise.

As editors, we had the pleasant yet challenging task of arranging and binding together the different contributions offered for this Festschrift. We have opted for an arrangement according to the different fields we mentioned in our initial request—studies in Genesis, in Job and in Hebrew linguistics—even though there are many cross-links between the different sections of the book. The rich diversity in colors and shapes of the different flowers in this bouquet did not make our task an easy one, but while each arrangement is obviously arbitrary, we hope the beauty of this bouquet will reside in its ensemble.

Moreover, the structure of this volume does reflect the academic path Ellen van Wolde has followed in her career. Her doctoral dissertation, subsequently published in the series Studia Semitica Neerlandica, dealt with a semiotic analysis of the Eden Story in Genesis 2–3,¹ and ever since, the book of Genesis has never left her. A few years after this first book, Ellen broadened her scope and published a monograph on the whole of the primeval history (Genesis 1–11),² and later articles deal with even more chapters from the first biblical book.³ Most notably, Ellen returned to the very first verses of the Hebrew Bible for the inaugural lecture of her professorship at the Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen, which she accepted in 2009, having been professor of Exegesis of the Old Testament and Hebrew at the University of Tilburg from 1992 onwards. In this inaugural lecture, she in particular revisited the meaning of the verb ‮ברא‬‎, which led to a lively scholarly debate,⁴ and to headlines in the national and international press, a rare feat for an inaugural lecture in biblical studies, indeed.

Also the book of Job occupies a central position in Ellen’s research since the very beginning of her career. After an ingenious, non-technical study on the book as a whole,⁵ she published a long and intricate article on Job’s notoriously difficult final words (42:1–6) in the proceedings of the 1992 Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense on the book.⁶ Bringing together her interests in the book of Job, in cognitive linguistics and in Hebrew semantics and lexicography, she organized in 2002 an interdisciplinary colloquium on the wisdom poem of Job 28.⁷ This meeting received financial and organizational support as an Academy Colloquium of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the first time a theological colloquium was granted this prestigious status. Less known to the international scholarly community, but not less fascinating, is Ellen’s collaboration with graphic designer Maurice Spithoven resulting in a highly creative typographical rendering of the book of Job.⁸ Recent articles show to what extent the book of Job continues to inspire Ellen’s academic work.⁹

Throughout Ellen van Wolde’s career, a defining characteristic of her work has been the study of the Hebrew language, and more in particular the study of how language expresses meaning. Already in the first pages of her doctoral dissertation, the question of how meaning is generated in the reading of texts is dealt with, and in the course of her career Ellen has thoroughly explored the possibilities of applying different linguistic models in the interpretation of biblical texts. Having studied with Umberto Eco in Bologna, semiotic theory defined the first years of her career,¹⁰ but soon Ellen also adopted new methodologies and approaches. On the one hand, she turned to syntax and its importance for the meaning not only of individual sentences, but also of broader textual complexes.¹¹ Inspired by the most recent developments in both general and Hebrew linguistics, she took the initiative to convene a conference on narrative syntax (or text linguistics) in 1996, which remains a milestone in the field.¹² On the other hand, lexical semantics, and in particular the cognitive-linguistic approach, has come to occupy a central place in Ellen’s research. This interest is not only witnessed by a number of specialized studies,¹³ but can be seen in a great many of her publications. In 2009, Ellen made an ambitious and encompassing proposal of how cognitive studies can fundamentally alter biblical studies, and can unify its overall fragmented nature. In what has become her magnum opus, she forcefully argues that the field would greatly benefit from paying attention to theories of cognition and to the ways in which ancient people thought, and conceptualized the world.¹⁴ Going beyond the limits of lexical semantics, Ellen has finally also made an innovative contribution to the understanding of the most intriguing of all verbal stems, viz. the niphal, and its consequences—as always in her work—for textual meaning.¹⁵

This overview of Ellen’s most important contributions to the fields from which the articles in this Festschrift in her honor are taken, does not do right to the full scope and richness of her academic output. This is mainly due to the fact that Ellen keeps innovating, and keeps reinventing herself as a scholar time and again, as for example her recent work on Psalms and on metaphors illustrates once more.¹⁶

It is our hope that by presenting this bouquet of flowers, newly grown in her fields of predilection, Ellen may not only enjoy its colors, shapes and scents, but may also be inspired when going to her academic garden or greenhouse again, and may in turn rejoice us with new flowers.

Pierre Van Hecke

Hanneke van Loon