John F. Elwolde – författare

In Greek and Roman Palestine we find a Hebrew dialect that had existed alongside the literary language of Biblical Hebrew but had followed its own pattern of development. After the destruction of the Temple, the rabbis elevated this dialect to the status of a literary language, 'Rabbinic Hebrew', and employed it in the composition of the Mishnah, Tosefta, and halakhic midrashim.This volume is a practical grammar of Rabbinic Hebrew that brings M.H. Segal's 1927 grammar up to date by incorporating the results of recent investigations in this field. It also adds a clearly pedagogic perspective, with vocabulary and exercises in every unit, and introduces readers to the thinking of the Sages of Israel (each unit commences with a text that bears on a theological, historical, literary, or methodological topic).

Following a successful symposium held in Leiden in 1995 a second international gathering took place, also in Leiden, two years later. The volume contains revised papers covering a wide range of linguistic and textual subjects and presented by scholars from eight countries: Austria (Reiterer), Denmark (Ehrensvard), France (Joosten), Israel (Fassberg, Hurvitz, Kister, Qimron), Netherlands (Baasten, Beentjes, Muraoka, van Peursen, van Uchelen, Wesselius), Spain (Perez Fernandez), UK (Aitken, Elwolde), USA (M. Smith). A subject index and an index locorum are included.