Cohen Y.
The Scribes and Scholars of the City of Emar in the Late Bronze Age.; 2009.
Publisher's VersionAbstractThe 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.
Cohen E.
The Modal System of Old Babylonian.; 2005.
Publisher's VersionAbstractThis 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.
Cohen O.
The Verbal Tense System in Late Biblical Hebrew Prose.; 2013.
Publisher's VersionAbstractThis 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.