The Origins and Development of the Waw-consecutive: Northwest Semitic Evidence from Ugarit to Qumran


Book Description

Preliminary Material -- Early Extra-biblical Evidence -- The Waw-Consecutive in Hebrew Prose -- The Waw-Consecutive in Qumran Literature -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index of Texts -- Index of Authors -- Index of Subjects.




Remembering Abraham


Book Description

According to an old tradition preserved in the Palestinian Targums, the Hebrew Bible is "the Book of Memories." The sacred past recalled in the Bible serves as a model and wellspring for the present. The remembered past, says Ronald Hendel, is the material with which biblical Israel constructed its identity as a people, a religion, and a culture. It is a mixture of history, collective memory, folklore, and literary brilliance, and is often colored by political and religious interests. In Israel's formative years, these memories circulated orally in the context of family and tribe. Over time they came to be crystallized in various written texts. The Hebrew Bible is a vast compendium of writings, spanning a thousand-year period from roughly the twelfth to the second century BCE, and representing perhaps a small slice of the writings of that period. The texts are often overwritten by later texts, creating a complex pastiche of text, reinterpretation, and commentary. The religion and culture of ancient Israel are expressed by these texts, and in no small part also created by them, as they formulate new or altered conceptions of the sacred past. Remembering Abraham explores the interplay of culture, history, and memory in the Hebrew Bible. Hendel examines the Hebrew Bible's portrayal of Israel and its history, and correlates the biblical past with our own sense of the past. He addresses the ways that culture, memory, and history interweave in the self-fashioning of Israel's identity, and in the biblical portrayals of the patriarchs, the Exodus, and King Solomon. A concluding chapter explores the broad horizons of the biblical sense of the past. This accessibly written book represents the mature thought of one of our leading scholars of the Hebrew Bible.




The Provenance of Deuteronomy 32


Book Description

This study offers an extensive survey of previous literature dealing with the provenance of the song in Deuteronomy 32, a renewed discussion of its text and language as well as an analysis of its poetic structure with the help of a new method. The author tests the tenability of older theories and proposes a new theory based on systematic research into the intertextual links with other parts of the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical literature of the Ancient Near East. Separate sections are dedicated to the song's descriptions of the relationship between YHWH and the gods and to the identity of the hostile people to which the song refers. The author concludes that a pre-exilic date is extremely likely for the song in its entirety.




Provenance of Deuteronomy Thirty-two


Book Description

A survey of previous literature about the provenance of the song in Deuteronomy 32 and a discussion of its text and poetic structure. The author concludes that the song dates from the pre-exilic period.




Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy


Book Description

Preliminary Material -- The Development of the Jewish Scripts -- The Scripts of the Dâliyeh (Samaria) Papyri -- The Palaeographical Dating of the Copper Document -- Palaeography and the Date of the Tell Faḫariyeh Bilingual Inscription -- A Papyrus Recording a Divine Legal Decision and the Root rḥq in Biblical and Near Eastern Legal Usage -- Ammonite Ostraca from Tell Ḥisbān -- Epigraphic Notes on the ʻAmmān Citadel Inscription -- Notes on the Ammonite Inscription from Tell Sīrān -- A Forgotten Seal -- The Seal of Miqnêyaw, Servant of Yahweh -- Epigraphic Notes on Hebrew Documents of the Eighth-Sixth Centuries B.C.: I. A New Reading of a Place Name in the Samaria Ostraca -- Epigraphic Notes on Hebrew Documents of the Eighth-Sixth Centuries B.C.: II. The Murabbaʻât Papyrus and the Letter Found near Yabneh-yam -- Epigraphic Notes on Hebrew Documents of the Eighth-Sixth Centuries B.C.: III. The Inscribed Jar Handles from Gibeon -- A Literate Soldier: Lachish Letter III -- Lachish Letter IV -- An Ostracon in Literary Hebrew from Ḥorvat ʻUza -- Judaean Stamps -- An Inscribed Weight from ʻArâg el-ʾEmîr -- The Hebrew Inscriptions from Sardis -- Inscriptions from Tel Seraʻ -- A Philistine Ostracon from Ashkelon -- The Cave Inscriptions from Ḫirbat Bayt Layy [Khirbet Beit Lei] -- The Stele Dedicated to Melqart by Ben-Hadad of Damascus -- Fragments of the Prayer of Nabonidus -- An Aramaic Inscription from Daskyleion -- A New Aramaic Stele from Taymāʾ -- An Aramaic Ostracon of the Third Century BCE from the Excavations in Jerusalem -- A Note on a Burial Inscription from Mount Scopus -- The Arrow of Suwar, Retainer of ʻAbday -- An Inscribed Arrowhead of the Eleventh Century BCE in the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem -- Newly Discovered Inscribed Arrowheads of the Eleventh Century BCE -- Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts -- A Phoenician Inscription from Idalion: Some Old and New Inscriptions Relating to Child Sacrifice -- The Phoenician Inscription from Brazil: A Nineteenth-Century Forgery -- An Interpretation of the Nora Stone -- Phoenicians in the West: The Early Epigraphic Evidence -- The Oldest Phoenician Inscription from Sardinia: The Fragmentary Stele from Nora -- Phoenician Incantations on a Plaque of the Seventh Century BCE from Arslan Tash in Upper Syria -- A Second Phoenician Incantation Text from Arslan Tash -- The Old Phoenician Inscription from Spain Dedicated to Hurrian Astarte -- The Pronominal Suffixes of the Third Person Singular in Phoenician -- An Ostracon in Greek Bearing the Names of the Gates of Idalion -- A Newly Published Inscription of the Persian Age from Byblos -- Jar Inscriptions from Shiqmona -- Two Offering Dishes with Phoenician Inscriptions from the Sanctuary of ʻArad -- An Old Canaanite Inscription Recently Found at Lachish -- An Inscribed Jar Handle from Raddana by Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman -- An Archaic Inscribed Seal from the Valley of Aijalon [Soreq] -- Inscribed Arrowheads from the Period of the Judges by J. T. Milik and Frank Moore Cross -- The Evolution of the Proto-Canaanite Alphabet -- A Ugaritic Abecedary and the Origins of the Proto-Canaanite Alphabet -- The Origin and Early Evolution of the Alph.




'Like 'Ilu Are You Wise'


Book Description

This volume honors Dennis G. Pardee, Henry Crown Professor of Hebrew Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and one of the preeminent experts in Northwest Semitic languages and literatures, particularly Ugaritic studies. The thirty-seven essays by colleagues and former students reflect the wide range of Professor Pardee's research interests and include, among other topics, new readings of inscriptions, studies of poetic structure, and investigations of Late Bronze Age society.




Studies in Semitic Vocalisation and Reading Traditions


Book Description

This volume brings together papers relating to the pronunciation of Semitic languages and the representation of their pronunciation in written form. The papers focus on sources representative of a period that stretches from late antiquity until the Middle Ages. A large proportion of them concern reading traditions of Biblical Hebrew, especially the vocalisation notation systems used to represent them. Also discussed are orthography and the written representation of prosody. Beyond Biblical Hebrew, there are studies concerning Punic, Biblical Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic, as well as post-biblical traditions of Hebrew such as piyyuṭ and medieval Hebrew poetry. There were many parallels and interactions between these various language traditions and the volume demonstrates that important insights can be gained from such a wide range of perspectives across different historical periods.




The Dead Sea Scrolls in Their Historical Context


Book Description

What is the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and what do we know about the community that possessed them? Avoiding both popular sensationalism and specialist technical language, this book aims to integrate all the latest findings about the scrolls into existing knowledge of the period, to advance understanding of the scrolls and the Qumran community, and to explore their wider significance in a scholarly and accessible way. The "state of the art" in international scrolls scholarship. Contributors include E.P. Sanders, Eugene Ulrich, George Brooke, and John J. Collins.




Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew


Book Description

Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew is an in-depth examination of Hebrew words that are of Akkadian origin or transmitted via Akkadian into the Hebrew lexicon.




Alleged Non-Past Uses of Qatal in Classical Hebrew


Book Description

This new monograph on the Hebrew verb examines those instances in which the qatal form (the so-called "perfect" or suffix conjugation) appears to refer to present or future events. The "gnomic", "prophetic", and "performative" perfects are each treated in turn. This study is especially intended for Hebrew linguists and scholars of the Old Testament, but its results will be of interest to scholars of other Semitic languages as well.