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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. [...]