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Toponymy on the Periphery: Placenames of the Eastern Desert, Red Sea, and South Sinai in Egyptian Documents from the Early Dynastic until the End of the New Kingdom. By JULIEN [...]

The Oxford Handbook of the Pentateuch. Edited by JOEL S. BADEN and JEFFREY STACKERT. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021. Pp. xvi + 572. $145. In line with the numerous other [...]

This article treats the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (JBA) 3rd person singular pronoun [phrase omitted] nawla, attested four times in the vast rabbinic corpus: three times in the Babylonian Talmud and one time in Tractate Sofrim. First, it is shown that the form is epicene, as it can have both masculine and feminine antecedents. Second, the four attestations reveal a specialized meaning for the form, to wit, 'this-one' or 'that-one' (as opposed to the other one) when there are specifically two items under discussion. Which is to say, the form [phrase omitted]: nawla is not used for simple 'he' or 'she' or 'this' or 'that', for which JBA and other Aramaic dialects have familiar and widely attested forms. Third, the article proposes that the form is borrowed from the Hurro-Urartian family, well known for its epicene pronouns. See, for example, Hurrian anni=lla, ani=lla, etc., Urartian i=ne=le, ina=ne=le, etc. Even though these forms are plural forms, while [phrase omitted] nawla is a singular form, comparative evidence demonstrates that when pronouns are borrowed from one language to another, they at times may jump person and number., to the memory of Saul Levin, [phrase omitted] (July 13, 1921-March 4, 2021) The vast majority of the lexical items registered in Michael Sokoloff's magisterial dictionaries of the various Aramaic [...]

How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? By RONALD HENDEL and JAN JOOSTEN. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. xvi + 221. $45. Scholars [...]

This article responds to a recent article by Stuart Irvine, regarding MT [??] 'according to their understanding' in Hosea 13:2. While Irvine argued that the form should be emended to [??] 'according to their design', the present essay notes parallels both from the domain of Hebrew morphology and from the world of Mesopotamian texts, which serve to support MT in this instance., A recent article by Stuart Irvine adduced new arguments for the emendation of the Masoretic Text (MT) [phrase omitted] 'according to their understanding' in Hos. 13:2 to [phrase omitted] 'according [...]

Ancient Hebrew Periodization and the Language of the Book of Jeremiah: The Case for a Sixth-Century Date of Composition. By AARON D. HORNKOHL. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, vol. [...]

The present article provides a detailed analysis of the complete Torah scroll, Nicholson Ms. 37, held at Fisher Library at the University of Sydney. The scroll was described by Alan Crown on several occasions (1967, 1984), though this precious treasure has not received the attention it deserves. We begin with a discussion of how the Nicholson collection, including the Torah scroll, reached Sydney. We then survey scribal matters such as: the layout of the two poems (Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32); the use of dilated letters in the service of the ומש היב system; special features such as tagin, dotted letters, large and small letters, etc.; corrections made by the scribe; and the manner of stitching. Most importantly, we now have a secure scientific dating of the scroll material, determined via 14C measurements: 17th century CE. The provenance, based on the handwriting and various paratextual features, is determined to be eastern Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article continues our study of the city-names Pithom and Rameses in Exodus 1:11 (the first part having been published in the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 33), along with related matters, with particular attention to the linguistic evidence. It is determined that: a) the transcription of ra-mz-zw as "Rameses" coheres with the Semitic evidence of the 13th-12th centuries BCE; b) the word "corvée" is not a borrowing from Neo-Assyrian (or any other Akkadian dialect) but rather constitutes a pure West Semitic word; c) the word "storages, storehouses" also is patient of a good West Semitic derivation; d) the narrative of Exodus 1-2 should not be divided into separate sources, but rather should be read in a holistic manner; and e) the two chapters are dated on linguistic grounds to the earliest stratum of Biblical Hebrew narrative prose literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes an etymology for the common Sabaic word brṯ 'place', namely, via derivation from the nominalised prepositional phrase b 'in' + ʾṯ r 'place', with two phonological shifts at play: (a) elision of the intervocalic glottal stop, and (b) metathesis of/ṯ / and/r/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the historical and archaeological background to the toponyms Pithom and Rameses in Exodus 1:11 as a counterargument to those who deny the traditional understanding that they refer to sites attested in the Ramesside era and favor the theory that they reflect 7th BCE (and even later) geopolitical realities. Recent excavations at Tell el-Retaba and Tell el-Maskhuta have helped clarify the situation and militate strongly against this redating. Linguistic issues will be addressed in the forthcoming second part of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]