Harvard Semitic Studies – serie

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. The first book-length treatment of the subject to appear in 90 years, this study provides a detailed treatment in dictionary form of the most plausible borrowings, including so-called semantic loans or loan-adaptations. A comprehensive analysis of Hebrew phonetic imitation of Akkadian words, with special attention to the influence of the Assyrian and Babylonian dialects, yields some new information on the phonology of the donor language during the loan period. This book will be of interest to Hebraists, Assyriologists, lexicographers, and students of Semitic philology.

This is the first complete study of Semitic internal noun patterns since that of Jacob Barth, over a century ago. Drawing on the earlier work of Semitists and linguists, this work presents a comprehensive new synthesis. This diachronic-comparative study presents the internal patterns individually and organizes them systematically. This study investigates the special role of noun patterns in isolated nouns and gives a complete list of reconstructible isolated nouns.This diachronic-comparative study presents the internal patterns individually and organizes them systematically. The roles of the patterns in the derivation of nouns from roots, and in nominal inflection, are shown as part of a reconstructed system. This study investigates the special role of noun patterns in isolated nouns, and gives a complete list of reconstructible isolated nouns.The heart of the book is devoted to studies of all individual reconstructible internal patterns with their Semitic reflexes, including mono- and bisyllabics and patterns with ungeminated or geminated second or third consonants.The book reaches conclusions on the structure of the Proto-Semitic pattern system, including categories of reconstructible and non-reconstructible patterns, semantic groups of patterns, and relationships between different patterns. Further, patterns merge and split diachronically, appearing in different roles in the attested languages, where new pattern systems are formed.

Part 1 of this study is a glossary with comparative analysis of non-normative Akkadian forms, Hittite and Hurrian words, West Semitic lexemes, and words of uncertain origin, with special attention given to the West Semitic forms. Part 2 consists of grammatical observations pertaining to the West Semitic forms, under the headings orthography, phonology, and morphology.

The editors have assembled here 55 key articles and notes by the well-known Harvard professor, organizing them under the categories Palaeography, Transjordanian Epigraphy, Hebrew Inscriptions, Aramaic Texts, and Old Canaanite and Phoenician Inscriptions. These essays, scattered in journals and various books, have now been brought together in one volume for easy access and attest to the life-long interest and contributions of one of the best-known epigraphers and palaeographers of the last 50 years.The appearance of Cross' "Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook" is the latest offering in the "Harvard Semitic Studies" series. This work carries on the rigorous standards of scholarship for which the series is known. Offerings such as "The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls", "Israelite Religion in the Light of Hebrew Inscriptions", and "A Grammar of Akkadian" attest to the outstanding scholarship found in the series.As one of the foremost scholars working in paleography and epigraphy, Cross needs little introduction to the readers of this journal. He is one of the foremost Semiticists of our time...While not everyone (e.g.,Mendenhall, Helck) will agree with the import of scholarship in this volume, it nonetheless elucidates the history of its subject matter very fittingly...the book is the essential collection of a great many articles that otherwise would have to be gathered by the individual researcher. I highly recommend it for any graduate course in West Semitic paleography or epigraphy. Budding epigraphists cannot afford to be without this summary of a great scholar's work.

Arabic grammatical thinking provides one of the richest and most significant contributions of medieval Islamic sciences to the history of human civilization. For the first time, this book traces down its formation during the second century of Islam (eighth century A.D.), before the age of the famous Halil b. Ahmad and his disciple Sibawayhi. Some 240 excerpts extracted from the earliest sources of the eighth and ninth centuries create a unique database, which is then analyzed critically. Consequently a clear scheme emerges of the sophisticated grammar of this pre-Halilian era. As a result, Halil's and Sibawayhi's revolt on this tradition is considered in detail.

In this comprehensive study, Professor Tappy rounds out the study of the Iron Age strata at Samaria that he began with the first volume of this work, published in 1992 (The Early Iron Age through the Ninth Century, HSS 44). Tappy's goal is to provide a thorough-going analysis of prior archaeologists' work at this important north Israelite site, with a view to providing a complete reconstruction of the depositional history of the site during the Iron Age. The two volumes together are important, not only for the history of the city of Samaria, but for the archaeological sequences of the Iron Age in northern Israel.

This monograph is a corpus-based description of the modal system of epistolary Old Babylonian, one of the best attested Akkadian dialects, using the European structural method. The study strives to match a concrete exponent (i.e., an array of formal features, morphological and syntactic) with a semantic value, in using syntactic criteria. The book treats:1. the asseverative paradigm (used for insistence, concession and oath), explaining the syntactic mechanism behind these forms;2. the various precative-based paradigms in various syntactic conditions: the directive group, the wish group and the interrogative group;3. the same forms occurring in special syntactic patterns-the sequential precative and the concessive-conditional precative;4. the paratactic conditional; and5. the modal nominal syntagm ša para:sim.Together with this description, some additional problems are addressed for which solutions are developed: the focus system of Old Babylonian; the general linguistic issue of "emphatic assertion" (using an English corpus); and a way to describe the syntactic nature of paratactic conditional structures.

This groundbreaking study examines the historical development of the Semitic languages from the point of view of grammaticalization, the linguistic process whereby lexical items and constructions lose their lexical meaning and serve grammatical functions. The author first provides an introduction to this process, followed by a comprehensive overview--with abundant examples from ancient and modern languages--of how it is exemplified in Semitic. Three successive chapters are devoted to in-depth studies of specific cases of grammaticalization: the definite article in Central Semitic, direct object markers across Semitic, and present tense prefixes in modern Arabic and Aramaic dialects. Drawing on evidence from many non-Semitic languages, from recent developments in the field of historical linguistics, and from traditional comparative Semitics, this book represents a major contribution to the field of comparative Semitics.

Semitic linguistics is arguably involved in its own version of a "maximalist versus minimalist" controversy with respect to verbal morphology. Dissent persists about whether and to what degree the Northwest Semitic verb paradigms underlying languages such as Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite (yaqtul, yaqtulu, yaqtula) are themselves determinative of tense-aspect-mood values, as opposed to extra-verbal structures ranging from syntax to discourse. To label a verb form as marked or unmarked for these values is to evoke a bountiful yet nebulous complex of theories about how language is built and employed. But Semitists have often unwittingly bleached markedness terms of their full historical and technical significance, reducing them to generic appellations that are invoked in sporadic and nearly random fashions. By applying markedness to Semitic morphology in a consistent and rigorous manner, this innovative book brings to bear a venerable linguistic construct on a persistent philological crux, in order to achieve deeper clarity in the structures and workings of Canaanite and Hebrew verbs. Korchin's arguments hold relevance for translating and interpreting nearly every sentence in ancient texts such as the Hebrew Bible and the Amarna letters.

The city of Emar, modern Tell Meskene in Syria, is one of the most important sites of the western ancient Near East during the Late Bronze Age that have yielded cuneiform tablets. The discovery of more than one thousand tablets and tablet fragments assures Emar's position, along with Bogazkoy-Hattusa and Ras-Shamra-Ugarit, as a major scribal center. Ephemeral documents such as wills or sale contracts, texts about rituals and cultic festivals, school texts and student exercises, and inscribed seals and their impressions enable reconstruction of the Emar scribal school institution and provide materials for investigation into the lives of more than fifty scribes whose works were found in the city. The aim of this book is to place Emar's scribal school institution within its social and historical context, to observe the participation of its teachers and students in the study of the school curriculum, to investigate the role of the scribes in the daily life of the city (in particular within the administration), and to evaluate the school's and its members' position within the network of similar institutions throughout the ancient Near East.

One of the intriguing and insufficiently understood features of Biblical Hebrew is the use of an infinitive form alongside a finite verb of the same root. The function of this construction has generally been understood as serving to provide some kind of emphasis. However, neither translations nor grammars are consistently able to explain what is being emphasized by the use of this construction. This volume, which is a revision of the author’s Ph.D. dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University (2006), examines the tautological infinitive construction in Classical Biblical Hebrew (that is, the Hebrew written during the First Temple Period, more or less equivalent to the material in Genesis–2 Kings, excluding "P") in order to give a coherent and consistent explanation of its function. In a final chapter, Kim discusses the use of the tautological infinitive in Classical Biblical Hebrew in relation to its use in non-Classical biblical texts and Semitic languages in order to set it in a broader context.

This book is the first wide-ranging study of the grammar of the Babylonian Aramaic used in the Talmud and post-Talmudic Babylonian literature (henceforth: Rabbinic Babylonian Aramaic) to be published in English in a century. The book takes as its starting point the long-recognized problem of the corrupt nature of the later textual witnesses of Babylonian Rabbinic literature and seeks both to establish criteria for the identification of accurate textual witnesses and describe the grammar of Rabbinic Babylonian Aramaic. The book is both programmatic and descriptive: it lays the foundations for future research into the dialect while clarifying numerous points of grammar, many of which have not been discussed systematically in the available scholarly literature.Following a critical survey of the currently available scholarly tools, the book considers the rôle of the Yemenite textual and reading traditions in the study of Rabbinic Babylonian Aramaic. While some previous authorities have regarded this tradition as a primary source for grammatical study of the dialect, by comparing the data of the earliest manuscripts to the forms employed in the Yemenite traditions, the present book demonstrates that the Yemenite traditions have been subject to secondary changes. Accordingly, it is concluded here that only the early eastern manuscripts preserve the dialect in its original form.The next chapter considers the problem of linguistic variation within the corpus. It is well established that the Talmudic literature employs a wide range of alternative grammatical forms. Several explanations have been proposed for this phenomenon. Some authorities have suggested that it arises from dialectal differences, while others have proposed that it represents the use of different literary registers. An alternative explanation is that the language was altered during the course of textual transmission. This study shows that none of these explanations can account for the wide extent of the phenomenon, which is found in the best textual witnesses and in ostensibly uniform contexts. It is argued that all of proposed explanations may partially account for the interchanges but, ultimately, the lack of a literary standard leads to the use of different forms.Syntax is often regarded as being one of the linguistic areas least affected by textual transmission. However, the early manuscripts show that Rabbinic Babylonian Aramaic employs a defined series of syntactic structures to mark the direct object. This clearly defined complimentary distribution is lost in the later textual witnesses, which use the structures interchangeably. It is thus shown that, for syntactic study, too, only a small group of textual witnesses can be regarded as reliable.

This study offers a synchronic and diachronic account of the Biblical Hebrew verbal tense system during the Second Temple period, based on the books of Esther, Daniel, and Ezra and Nehemiah, along with the non-synoptic parts of Chronicles. In analyzing the development of this system, Cohen discerns the changes that mark the transition from the classical era to the Second Temple period.The book is divided into two main parts: a survey of previous research along with the methodology of the present study; and a descriptive analysis of the verbal system in late biblical prose literature. In the first section, the author discusses the eclectic nature of the biblical corpus, including the ramifications of this heterogeneity on linguistic efforts to for­mulate a synchronic structural account of its texts. Moreover, he surveys the principal linguistic concepts of tense, aspect, and mood, and the ver­bal paradigm’s complex nature. The second part of the book offers a synchronic account of the Second Temple period verbal system. It features a categorical breakdown and analysis of all the verb forms in the corpus’s prose texts. The author examines the reasons behind these changes by dint of a diachronic comparison with other strata of the Hebrew language—namely, biblical texts of the First Temple period, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the language of the Sages.

Mighty Baal: Essays in Honor of Mark S. Smith is the first edited collection devoted to the study of the ancient Near Eastern god Baal. Although the Bible depicts Baal as powerless, the combined archaeological, iconographic, and literary evidence makes it clear that Baal was worshipped throughout the Levant as a god whose powers rivalled any deity. Mighty Baal brings together eleven essays written by scholars working in North America, Europe, and Israel. Essays in part one focus on the main collection of Ugaritic tablets describing Baal’s exploits, the Baal Cycle. Essays in part two treat Baal’s relationships to other deities. Together, the essays offer a rich portrait of Baal and his cult from a variety of methodological perspectives.The Harvard Semitic Studies series publishes volumes from the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. Other series offered by Brill that publish volumes from the Museum include Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant and Harvard Semitic Monographs, https://hmane.harvard.edu/publications.