Preliminary Material /Steven E. Fassberg -- Introduction /Steven E. Fassberg -- Description and Classification of Manuscripts /Steven E. Fassberg -- Orthography and Phonology /Steven E. Fassberg -- Syllable Structure /Steven E. Fassberg -- Rule of Shewa /Steven E. Fassberg -- Morphology /Steven E. Fassberg -- Two Syntactic Features /Steven E. Fassberg -- Tables /Steven E. Fassberg -- Indices /Steven E. Fassberg -- Bibliography /Steven E. Fassberg -- Addenda and Corrigenda /Steven E. Fassberg.

This book provides a comprehensive grammatical and lexicographical review of all types of late Samaritan Hebrew in all their literary manifestations from the twelfth century to the present. Much of it is devoted to description of Hybrid Samaritan Hebrew (HSH), which since the 13th is used as the main written language of the Samaritan community. The whole research is based on study of a wide range of texts. All available liturgical material was computer-recorded and then analyzed. A vast array of chronicles, colophons and deeds of sale copied from manuscripts were also computerized. Included as well are unpublished manuscripts of prayers. Audio recordings and phonetic transcriptions were made of dozens of Samaritan prayers and piyyutim, and served as a database for the phonological and the morphological analysis of the language.

A collection of essays by international experts summarizing recent developments in Genizah research.

This volume contains studies that explore the content and meaning of the Qumran manuscripts of the Aramaic Books of Enoch, the Book of Giants, and related literature. The essays shed new light on the lexicon, orthography and grammar of the Aramaic scrolls, as well as their relationship to schematic astronomy in ancient Mesopotamia. Contributors examine the origin of the angelic tradition of the Watchers, the textual and literary relationship of the Aramaic scrolls to the Book of the Watchers, and the culpability of humanity in the spread of evil on earth according to the myth of the fallen angels.

In this volume—the first complete history of Aramaic from its origins to the present day—Holger Gzella provides an accessible overview of the language perhaps most well known for being spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. Gzella, one of the world’s foremost Aramaicists, begins with the earliest evidence of Aramaic in inscriptions from the beginning of the first millennium BCE, then traces its emergence as the first world language when it became the administrative tongue of the great ancient Near Eastern empires. He also pays due diligence to the sacred role of Aramaic within Judaism, its place in the Islamic world, and its contact with other regional languages, before concluding with a glimpse into modern uses of Aramaic. Although Aramaic never had a unified political or cultural context in which to gain traction, it nevertheless flourished in the Middle East for an extensive period, allowing for widespread cultural exchange between diverse groups of people. In tracing the historical thread of the Aramaic language, readers can also gain a stronger understanding of the rise and fall of civilizations, religions, and cultures in that region over the course of three millennia. Aramaic: A History of the First World Language is visually supplemented by maps, charts, and other images for an immersive reading experience, providing scholars and casual readers alike with an engaging overview of one of the most consequential world languages in history.

Targum Canticles, composed in the dialectally eclectic idiom of Late Jewish Literary Aramaic (LJLA), had immense historic popularity among Jewish communities worldwide. In this work, Paul R. Moore thoroughly analyses several of the Targum’s grammatical peculiarities overlooked by previous studies. Through this prism, he considers its literary influences, composition, and LJLA as a precursor of the highly eccentric Aramaic of the 13th century Spanish cabalistic masterpiece, The Zohar. The study includes transcriptions and analysis of the previously unpublished of fragments of the Targum from the Cairo Geniza, and what is possibly its earliest, known translation into Judaeo-Arabic.

The twenty-six essays in this volume represent the papers read at the international Conference on the Aramiac Bible held in Dublin (1992). The purpose of the Conference was to bring together leading specialists on the Targums and related topics to discuss issues in the light of recent developments, for instance Second Temple interpretation of the Scriptures, Qumran Literature, targumic and Palestinian Aramaic, new Genizah manuscripts, Jewish tradition, Origen's Hexapla, Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha and the Christian West. The papers are arranged under seven headings: Targum Texts and Editions; The Aramaic Language: The Targums and Jewish Biblical Interpretation; Targums of the Pentateuch; Targums of the Hagiographa; Targums and New Testament; Jewish Traditions and Christian Writings. The international team, drawn from nine countries, is as follows (following the order of the papers); M. Klein, S. Reif, L. Diez Merino, R. Gordon, M. McNamara, S.A. Kaufman, E. Cook, M. Hengel, O. Betz, A. Shinan, J. Ribera, B. Grossfeld, P.V.M. Flesher, G. Boccaccini, M. Maher, R. Hayward, R. Syren, P.S. Alexander, D.R.G. Beattie, C. Mangan, B. Ego, M. Wilcox, B. Chilton, G.J. Norton, B. Kedar Kopstein, M. Stone.

Publisher Description

In the Semitic languages the vowels are not part of the alphabet and each Semitic language has its special method of marking its particular vowel values. In the Hebrew of Late Antiquity, a supralinear method of doing this was first introduced after the Arabic conquest of Palestine in the seventh century. It was used mainly for liturgical purposes in complicated poetic texts, and it was soon displaced by the classical Tiberian system. The oldest existing specimens of this supralinear method are on vellum manuscripts from Cairo where the remaining fragments were deposited by Jewish refugees from Crusader Palestine at the end of the eleventh century. The fragments from the Cairo depository, known as the Cairo Genizah, are best represented in the Genizah Collections at Cambridge University Library. This volume gives for the first time a full description of the scattered and torn fragments, as well as of their notational value.

This fourth volume covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam.