Harvard Semitic Studies - HSS

An in-depth analysis of the process of education for scribes during the period of Sargonic hegemony in ancient Mesopotamia (c. 2335-2150 BCE). The book provides a holistic study of the topic, addressing the technology of writing, the school texts used in education, the languages of instruction, and the social and historical context of scribal life and an education in cuneiform writing. The topic of scribal education at such an early period of Mesopotamian history has never been addressed at length before. Nicholas Kraus convincingly argues that scribal education during the Sargonic period was closely tied to the administrative institutions of the Sargonic Empire and prepared a scribe to become an effective administrator.

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.

Professor Huehnergard's key to his extensive Akkadian Grammar will be welcomed by teacher and student alike. Please note that this third edition of the key is a revision that complements the third edition of the Grammar, incorporating a number of corrections.

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.

This book will be widely welcomed by students and scholars of Biblical Hebrew, Comparative Semitics, and linguistics.

New: Seven high-resolutions scans are now available online for browsing key images of the pyramid of Unas in detail: Antechamber, North Wall (right) and West Wall | Antechamber, West Wall | Sarcophagus Chamber, East Wall | Sarcophagus Chamber, West Wall | Sarcophagus Chamber, West Gable, center | Antechamber, East Wall, upper | Antechamber, East Wall, lower

The earliest connected Semitic texts known to modern scholars are usually thought to be East Semitic texts from Mesopotamia, written in the cuneiform script. In this monograph, Richard C. Steiner deciphers Semitic texts that are even earlier--Northwest Semitic texts in hieroglyphic script that have been "hiding in plain sight" among the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom.

The Semitic texts are embedded in two series of Egyptian spells designed to protect the king's mummy against snakes. They are orthographically distinct from the rest of the Pyramid Texts, characterized by exceptional phonetic spelling reminiscent of the "group writing" used to write foreign names and texts in later times. Most editors of the Pyramid Texts have considered them unintelligible.

The Semitic and Egyptian passages in these spells are mutually elucidating. The Egyptian context contains phrases that reveal the meaning of corresponding Semitic phrases as well as clues that reveal the origin of the texts. The Semitic, in turn, helps to clarify the Egyptian, bringing a degree of cohesiveness and order to a group of spells that previously seemed like a hodgepodge. As Robert K. Ritner writes in his foreword to the monograph: "We have thus gone from a string of isolated invocations, many of them gibberish, to a coherent logically constructed, tripartite ritual with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end. This seems to me a remarkable advance."

In the third edition of A Grammar of Akkadian, changes have been made in the section on the nom­i­n­al morpheme -ån (§20.2) and the sections on the meaning of the D stem (§24.3) and the Gt stem (§33.1(b)); these revisions reflect recent scholarship in Akkadian grammar. For those who have earlier editions of the book, pdfs of these revisions are available here (PDF).

Other changes include minor revisions in wording in the presentation of the grammar in a few other sections; a number of new notes to some of the readings; additions to the glosses of a small number of words in the lesson vocabularies (and the Glossary and English–Akkadian word list); and updates of the resources available for the study of Akkadian, and of the bibliography.

A new appendix (F) has been added, giving Hebrew and other Semitic cognates of the Akkadian words in the lesson vocabularies. This appendix is also available here (PDF).

The pagination of the first and second editions has for the most part been retained, apart from the insertion of the new appendix and a few minor deviations elsewhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Huehnergard's pioneering monograph investigated the essentially unvocalized nature of the alphabetic script used to write Ugaritic, which is, of course, a major hindrance to our attempts to understand the language and its texts. Without a clear picture of the vocalization of the language, we cannot understand its word structure and, thus, its morphology. Apart from the three aleph signs used in Ugaritic, the major source for the vocalization of the language is Ugaritic texts written in syllabic cuneiform.

This fine resource by Huehnergard was first published in 1987 and has been out of print for several years. In this revised edition, Huehnergard adds an appendix of 32 pages of new materials and corrections, all keyed to the original publication. A complete set of indexes—including texts cited and words in various Semitic languages—provides handy access to the wealth of data presented in the book. The revised edition thus brings this important reference work fully up to date and once again makes it available to students of Ugaritic specifically and Northwest Semitic in general.

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; and

5. 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.

One of the perennial problems within the study of biblical Hebrew syntax is how the five basic verbal clause types - QATAL, YIQTOL, WeQATAL, WeYIQTOL and WAYYIQTOL - as well as participial and verbless clauses provide the meaning and structure of narrative prose.

This definitive study examines two cases of extended narrative: The Novella of Joseph (Genesis 37, 39-47) and the Court Narrative of David (2 Samuel 9-20; 1 Kings 1-2) and analyzes the independent clauses within each.

This comprehensive examination demonstrates that the arrangement of clause types in narrative is not random or infinite. In narrative, specific sets of differing types of clauses either begin or conclude paragraphs or provide two types of commentary upon certain elements of the narrative. In direct discourse, a limited number of clause constellations can occur. Differing clause types in narrative, therefore, determine the structure of the storyline; differing clause types in direct discourse determine the purpose of the speech.