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The Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.
This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eastern Aramaic dialects first developed tense-conditioned ergative aligment in the perfect, which later developed into a past perfective. However, while some modern dialects preserve a degree of ergative aligment, it has been eroded by movement towards semantic/Split-S alignment and by the use of separate marking for the patient, and some dialects have lost ergative alignment altogether. These dialects therefore show an entire cycle of alignment change, something which had previously been considered unlikely. Eleanor Coghill examines evidence from ancient Aramaic text...
Tehom, the Hebrew Bible’s primeval deep, is a powerful concept often overlooked outside of creation and conflict contexts. Primeval waters mark the boundary between life and death in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East, representing the duality of both deliverance and judgment. This book examines all contexts of Tehom to explain its conceptual forms and use as a proper noun. Comparative methodology combined with affect and spatial theories provide new ways to understand how religious communities repurposed Tehom. These interpretations of Tehom empower resilience in times of suffering and oppression.
This volume in honour of Eep Talstra focusses on the function of tradition in the formation and reception of the Bible, and the role of the innovations brought about by ICT in reconsidering existing interpretations of texts, grammatical concepts, and lexicographic practices.
The Apocrypha : an introduction / Gerbern S. Oegema -- The Apocrypha in the context of early Judaism / Gerbern S. Oegema -- The Apocrypha, the Septuagint, and other Greek witnesses / Kristin de Troyer -- A canonical history of the Old Testament apocryphay / Lee Martin MacDonald -- The Apocrypha in the history of Christianity / Tobias Nicklas -- The Protestant reception of the Apocrypha / Matthew Korpman -- Apocrypha, genre, and historicity / Gerbern S. Oegema -- 1 Esdras/Greek Ezra / Lester L. Grabbe -- Baruch/Karina Martin Hogan -- Book of Judith / Deborah Levine Gera -- 1 Maccabees' ethics, etiquette, political theology, and structure / Doron Mendels -- 2 Maccabees / Michael Duggan -- 3 Ma...
This study is the first wide-scope morpho-syntactic comparative study of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects to date. Given the historical depth of Aramaic (almost 3 millennia) and the geographic span of the modern dialects, coming in contact with various Iranian, Turkic and Semitic languages, these dialects provide an almost pristine "laboratory" setting for examining language change from areal, typological and historical perspectives. While the study has a very wide coverage of dialects, including also contact languages (and especially Kurdish dialects), it focuses on a specific grammatical domain, namely attributive constructions, giving a theoretically motivated and empirically grounded account of their variation, distribution and development. The results will be enlightening not only to Semitists seeking to learn about this fascinating modern Semitic language group, but also for typologists and general linguists interested in the dynamics of noun phrase morphosyntax.
The present volume contains a collection of essays on the Book of Isaiah offered as a tribute to Arie van der Kooij on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, which coincides with his retirement as Professor of Old Testament at Leiden University. The twenty-four contributions, written by leading scholars in the field of Old Testament studies, focus on the Book of Isaiah within the context of Hebrew and ancient near-eastern writings, particularly those from the Neo-Assyrian period, as well as on the book's reception history , particularly in its Greek and Syriac translations. Together these studies offer a rich and original contribution to the study of the Book of Isaiah in its Hebrew, Aramaic, Assyrian, Greek, Syriac, and Dutch contexts.
The annual Review of Biblical Literature presents a selection of reviews of the most recent books in biblical studies and related fields, including topical monographs, multi-author volumes, reference works, commentaries, and dictionaries. RBL reviews German, French, Italian, and English books and offers reviews in those languages.
This volume is the result of the 2021 session of the Linguistics and the Biblical Text research group of the Institute for Biblical Research, which addresses the history, relevance, and prospects of broad theoretical linguistic frameworks in the field of biblical studies. Cognitive Linguistics, Functional Grammar, generative linguistics, historical linguistics, complexity theory, and computational analysis are each allotted a chapter, outlining the key theoretical commitments of each approach, their major concepts and/or methods, and their important contributions to contemporary study of the biblical text. As academic disciplines and academic publishing proliferate and become more complex in...
The Hebrew of the Late Second Temple Period is directly attested in the Scrolls from Qumran and other manuscripts discovered in the Judaean Desert. Indirectly, it is also found in some manuscripts copied in later times, which still preserve linguistic elements of the Hebrew from the period in which the texts were authored. Often referred to as the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls or Qumran Hebrew, and positioned chronologically between Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew, its nature remains disputed. Some essays in this volume deal with linguistic and philological problems of this Late Second Temple Period Hebrew. Other papers discuss the nature and linguistic profile of the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls.