Harvard Semitic Studies - HSS

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.

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 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.

The first full-length treatment of the biblical "primal human" traditions in their ancient Israelite setting, this book provides historical-critical analyses of the relevant biblical traditions, sensitive both to the present literary context of the traditions and to their roots in the ancient Near East. The study focuses on Genesis 1-3, Ezekiel 28:1-10 and 11-19, Job 15:7-16, and Proverbs 8:22-31, to reveal the ways various tradents used these intermediary divine-human figures and to examine the underlying social significance shared by such traditions in the cultural milieu of ancient Israel.

This is the first complete study of Semitic internal noun patterns since that of Jacob Barth, over a century ago. Drawing on the earlier work of Semitists and linguists, this work presents a comprehensive new synthesis. This diachronic-comparative study presents the internal patterns individually and organizes them systematically. This study investigates the special role of noun patterns in isolated nouns and gives a complete list of reconstructible isolated nouns.

This diachronic-comparative study presents the internal patterns individually and organizes them systematically. The roles of the patterns in the derivation of nouns from roots, and in nominal inflection, are shown as part of a reconstructed system. This study investigates the special role of noun patterns in isolated nouns, and gives a complete list of reconstructible isolated nouns.

The heart of the book is devoted to studies of all individual reconstructible internal patterns with their Semitic reflexes, including mono- and bisyllabics and patterns with ungeminated or geminated second or third consonants.

The book reaches conclusions on the structure of the Proto-Semitic pattern system, including categories of reconstructible and non-reconstructible patterns, semantic groups of patterns, and relationships between different patterns. Further, patterns merge and split diachronically, appearing in different roles in the attested languages, where new pattern systems are formed.

The editors have assembled here 55 key articles and notes by the well-known Harvard professor, organizing them under the categories Palaeography, Transjordanian Epigraphy, Hebrew Inscriptions, Aramaic Texts, and Old Canaanite and Phoenician Inscriptions. These essays, scattered in journals and various books, have now been brought together in one volume for easy access and attest to the life-long interest and contributions of one of the best-known epigraphers and palaeographers of the last 50 years.

In this volume, Beatrice Gruendler addresses a perplexing problem -- the development of Arabic script from its ancestor alphabet, Nabatean. Her work sorts through texts, inscriptions, and papyri to piece together the evolutionary trail of the Arabic alphabet. Profusely illustrated with line drawings and charts, this study will remain a sourcebook for researching the history of Arabic.

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.

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 numer of corrections.

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.

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.