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Review

A Cultural History of Aramaic

Notes on
A Cultural History of Aramaic
From the Beginnings to the Advent of Islam
By
Holger Gzella

Sometime ago I put out a request for reviews of this extensive (xvi, 451 pp. and expensive: €168,00) volume from Brill but received no responses. At the time it, like many recent Brill publications, was available on the paid Scribd web site, but alas it, also like many of its congeners, is no longer to be found there. Lacking, then, such a thorough review, I have decided to publish here some of my notes upon working through the volume. This is not meant to be taken as a definitive review.

The author is a student of the late Klaus Beyer, and has been overly influenced by the many peculiarities of Beyer’s treatment of Aramaic dialectology. Beyer’s work is by far the largest source of footnotes. Now that Prof. Beyer (1928-2014) has passed away (see the fine in memoriam by M. Moriggi in Hen 36(1.2014), it is time for an honest assessment of his massive and often masterful contribution to Aramaic studies. Unfortunately, perhaps, this is not that assessment. It instead presents an idiosyncratic history of Aramaic, based on the work of Gzella himself and that of his teacher, often without justification here but only with references to earlier articles. Over and over again Gzella simply refers to his or Beyer’s own articles as the truth without giving details. I for one am not prepared to go back and study each of these articles to find out the justification for such statements. Admittedly this book is for a general audience, but it is repeatedly frustrating to see idiosyncratic positions referred to as common scholarly opinion.

From a book entitled A Cultural History of Aramaic, one expects precisely a cultural history: What was the native culture like of those who spoke these dialects? How did they interrelate among themselves? What was the nature of their societies and and the political and religious differences among the various societies for whom Aramaic was the primary vehicle of communication? How did the political and social contacts with neighboring peoples and the empires in which they found themselves influence their culture and their language? But this book never achieves anything approaching such a synthesis. Instead we learn (p.2.) of the following goal of the book:

Since Aramaic was not used by one well-defined speech community but by very different groups and in quite distinct social contexts, this work does not focus on the history of Aramaean peoples and their culture throughout the ages. Rather, it follows the language in its meanderings from the Ancient Near Eastern city-states and empires via the Greco-Roman matrix cultures into the Islamic period.

We might question the logic conveyed by the first word of that paragraph, but clearly a fundamental problem with this work is simply that it is misleadingly titled. Well we all know about publishers on that score and are prepared to forgive the author for such a concession. We must focus, then, on the Aramaic language and see if the book’s goals to give us some kind of clear picture of its development up to the Arab conquest has here been met. I find several major and constant flaws with this work on that score:

a) The language is rambling and repetitive, especially in the introductory material.*1 It reads like, and probably is, notes from lectures on the history of Aramaic combined with material from the author’s previous publications. Although there are a few clear grammatical tables in the beginning of the work, far too many such presentations are in prose: herewith an example:

Suffixes attached to finite verbs express pronominal direct objects. Except for the first person singular /-nī/ ‘me’, these correspond to the possessive suffixes. Forms of the “perfect” that end in a consonant take a linking vowel, whereas suffixed “imperfects” with an /-n-/ intervening between the verbal base and the suffix are customarily interpreted as “long” forms plus a remnant of the old “energic” ending /-an/ or /-anna/. No such /-n-/ appears to have been used with suffixed forms of the “short imperfect” and the imperative. Later vocalization traditions point to many secondary developments in suffixed verbs in the historical languages.

Now this is probably clear to experienced semitists, but if one does not already know Aramaic, how is such a paragraph possibly to be understood?

b) The author is fixated on the role of Achaemenid (Imperial or Official) Aramaic in the development of the Aramaic dialects at the expense of clearly described linguistic developments, a fixation previously often expressed in his earlier publications: Tempus, Aspekt und Modalität im Reichsaramäischen, Wiesbaden 2004, “The Heritage of Imperial Aramaic in Eastern Aramaic”, in: AS 6: 85–109. 2008, and most clearly in: “Das sprachliche Prestige des Reichsaramäischen”, in: R. Rollinger et al.( eds.), Interkulturalität in der Alten Welt: Vorderasian, Hellas, Ägypten und die vielfältigen Ebenen des Kontakts , Wiesbaden, 489–505 2010. By explaining everything as due to the influence of such a prestige dialect, however, one avoids having to deal with detailed problematic developments, rather entire periods are summarized with paragraphs such as the following (p. 335):

Such a reconstruction [i.e. of the linguistic situation in the east at the rise of the Eastern Aramaic dialects-sak] obviously also has to take into account other languages used in this vast region, especially Greek in Byzantine Syria and Iranian idioms in Parthian and Sassanian Mesopotamia, and subsequently Arabic, which gradually came to dominate speech and writing with the rise of Islam in the Fertile Crescent since the eighth century c.e. Research on the exact modalities of contact between Aramaic and other languages during these periods is still in its infancy, but some general tendencies may be noted: the imprint of Greek on early Syriac by and large seems to affect the lexicon, later also the discursive prose style, whereas long-term exposure to Iranian over time triggered fundamental changes in the syntax of the contemporaneous Aramaic vernaculars, especially in the verbal system. These have dramatically altered the structure of the Eastern Neo-Aramaic languages, but individual, though mostly indirect, reflexes of such an evolution in the vernacular can apparently already be observed in the written material.

So, pray tell, exactly why did the Greek lexicon influence Syriac? Is it only in works translated from the Greek and otherwise only in political and scientific terminology? Who was influenced by Iranian and why? Only those writers whose native language was Iranian and only in the eastern regions or many others?*2

c) As we might expect from a scholar whose primary interest is in the older periods, early texts and dialects are studied in detail, while the many times more massive first millennium CE material gets short shrift. For the older periods, a relatively complete discussion of the kinds of texts known is presented, but for the later periods there is only disaster.

Herewith some comments on details:

(p.27) It is particularly troubling that Gzella, as seems to be his pattern in all of his publications, presents his own opinion as a factual statement of the current state of discussions of the issue; the following example of this pattern is nonsense: :

Remnants of the old feminine-singular ending in /-at/ in the Hermopolis letters and in Achaemenid Official Aramaic have occasionally been explained as accusative markers in a few older studies, but this view could not be corroborated and has been abandonedin the meantime (cf. Gzella 2011b: 578 and 583 for simpler and more plausible explanations). Already the earliest Phoenician inscriptions from the tenth century b.c.e. may point to a loss of case inflection (see Gzella 2013f: 176–182).

What does Phoenician have to do with the history of “case inflection” in Aramaic, pray tell? Then on the very next page he says: Only remnants of the older feminine singular ending /-at/ or /-t/ (the distribution of the two allomorphs seems essentially lexical) are preserved in unbound forms, especially a few nouns serving as adverbs. Combining the two statements one sees that Prof. Gzella does not realize that “adverbs” are remnants of the “accusative” (better termed “adverbial”) case of Semitic in general!

(p. 26)

Person Singular Plural 1 masc./fem. /ʾanā/ ‘I’ /ʾanáḥnā/ ‘we’ 2 masc. /ʾáttā/ ‘you’ /ʾattom/ ‘you’ 2 fem. /ʾáttī/ ‘you’ /ʾattenn/ ‘you’ 3 masc. /hūʾ/ > /hū/ ‘he’ /hóm(ū)/ ‘they’ 3 fem. /hīʾ/ > /hī/ ‘she’ /hénnī/ ‘they’ Whence henni?, and what is the evidence the short /i/ was already e in earliest aramaic? (p. 28) State, by contrast, belongs to the typical features of Semitic nominal morphology. The “absolute” state (or “unbound form”) acts as the unmarked form; when the emphatic state emerged as a postpositive definite article, the absolute state came to signal indefiniteness. It is generally used with the quantifier /koll/ ‘all’, adverbial and numerical constructions, and predicative adjectives.

But this applies only to eastern aramaic after the loss of the definiteness, here it appears in the first chapter as a characteristic of Aramaic! The often-proposed Akkadian origin of this feature is ignored, presumably because it was not proposed by Beyer.

(p. 28)

Morphological definiteness marking spread gradually during the opening centuries of the first millennium b.c.e., following a common tendency in Northwest Semitic.

This is typical of the author’s use of prose instead of providing tabular details. (Actually a more specific statement as to the identity and derivation of this “morphological definiteness marking” has already been mentioned on p. 21!) Further, how do we know that it spread gradually? How gradual is gradually? Where did it spread to, when, and from where? How about some examples. Elsewhere (p. 69) one finds typically rambling discussions of the early history of such marking, as usual without clear examples or serious analysis. Nor does the author attempt to determine just when final -ā was used in the earlier texts and when it wasn’t, but rather just says the distinction was “construction bound,” whatever that means.

Re definiteness and definite object marking, on p. 75 we note a statement re nṣb zn ‘this stele’ (kai 214:1; 215:1.20)213 that is totally contradicted by a previous footnote (190) on the same subject. One suspects that a search through the PDF version for any number of subjects will reveal similar repetitions and/or contradictions throughout the work.

(p. 69)

Given the one instance of dissimilation of the first of two “emphatic” consonants in kyṣʾ ‘summer’ (kai 216:19, a Central Syrian Aramaic text from Samʾal, see below) instead of the expected *qyṣʾ from the original /*qayθ̣-/ cannot count as a distinctive local dialectal trait, because the very same text also contains the non-dissimilated form ṣdq ‘justice’ (kai 216:4–5).

This is wrong. As one learns from the details of “Geers’ Law” in Akkadian, the early Semitic dissimilation of emphatics in words with multiple instances of them depends largely on their sequence and hierarchy, not just their presence.

pp. 81-85 The discussion of the use of “asyndetic imperfects” in the Tel Dan stele and, as is necessarily related, the use or not of the narrative preterite form in early Aramaic is convoluted and quite incorrect. This is not the place to discuss the details issue, which I have dealt with in several earlier contributions.

(p. 286 re western Aramaic)

Scribal practice of that time shows a general weakening of Achaemenid standards in favour of a more phonetic spelling (with, for instance, widespread h instead of ʾ as a vowel letter for final /-ā/ in the emphatic state.

Why is final “h” for final -ā a phonetic spelling?

(fn. 959, in reference to the the addition of nun to words ending in long vowel)

See Beyer 1984: 149 for examples. This feature has been considered a specifically Jewish Palestinian or Western Aramaic trait in older literature (e.g., Kutscher 1976: 32; similarly still Sokoloff 2011a: 612), but its wider Aramaic distribution is now an established fact.

Established by whom and for what dialects? And one could go on with many more such examples. I do find one very sage statement in this book (p. 341):

There is no reason to assume that Aramaic in the region was less diversified in Late Antiquity than it is at present.

*1*And like far too many Brill publications by non English-speaking authors, poorly proofread.

*2*As regards Greek, Gzella has dealt with the matter to somewhat greater extent in his rambling review of Aaron Butts, Language Change in the Wake of Empire. Syriac in Its Greco-Roman Context (Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic, 11). Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, 2016 in Bibliotheca Orientalis 73(2016): 759ff.

Dictionaries, Review

A new Dictionary of Qumran Aramaic

Edward M. Cook has been closely involved with the development of Qumran Aramaic studies for thirty years and has previously published two major lexical projects in Aramaic, a dictionary to (some of?) the targumim in the Accordance computer program database and A Glossary of Targum Onkelos: According to Alexander Sperber’s Edition (Brill, 2008). He is thus the perfect person to undertake the work here reviewed.

We are not quite sure if it should be called a “Dictionary,” however. Unlike the Onkelos volume, which contained only brief glosses and little else, this one’s entries are extensive; but they are not the kind of entries usually associated with an academic lexicon. Rather they are more like a concordance, with the examples within entries arranged by semantics or by grammatical context rather than by text number or alphabetical order. One gets the impression that, except perhaps for the very most common words, almost every example of every word is given in its context. But little of what one might expect to find in a traditional scholarly lexicon is to be found in the entries here: Notably missing are an indication of the vocalization and morphological structures of well-known words, lists of derived forms for verbs, or even a guide for students as to what words are common elsewhere in Aramaic and what are relatively or extremely rare.

This work would seem, then, to be of little value to a novice. Its major contribution may well be instead a collection of all of the most thoroughly studied readings of texts whose correct readings and interpretations have long been subject to dispute—and there are hundreds of such problematic readings in this corpus. The Dictionary contains many revised and undoubtedly correct readings, not all of which are indicated in notations, as well as frequent references to the earlier publications whose readings are here accepted or have been rejected.

An important, unadvertised, feature is the fact that Cook here proposes many readings of fragmentary passages differing from those of earlier editions. In most cases Cook’s readings are superior to those of earlier scholars, which is not surprising considering that the earlier scholars, by and large, were not Aramaists! Perhaps the worst decision of the Israeli board in charge of the final publication of the scrolls was to assign the remaining Aramaic texts of Milik’s Nachlass to E. Puech, a well-known epigrapher who is generally recognized to have had little knowledge of Aramaic at the time. Puech’s ignorance of Aramaic (both grammar and lexicon) is repeatedly demonstrated here (though never emphasized—Cook is too nice) in the notes to several entries. For an example of each see the notes to אל “do not” and עבד “to make”.

Except for 1QapGen and 11QtgJob, references are given by text number rather than by text name. This was an unfortunate choice, as it immediately removes the context of text genre from such citations. (An index of text numbers, sigla, and “definitive” publication is included in the Introduction, to be sure.) Another notable lack that could easily have been remedied is an index to cited passages, such as the immensely useful ones provided by Sokoloff in his Jewish Aramaic dictionaries. As a final general comment, one wishes Cook would have included the material from the Genizah copies of the Testament of Levi. The undoubtedly Qumranic vocabulary of that text is adduced here only occasionally.

The origin of Akkadian loanwords is sometimes (e.g. s.v. גנון “bridal chamber”) but not consistently indicated in any pattern I can determine; see for example אסי “to heal”, אשף “magician”, מסכן “poor person”, and דש “door.”

Cook has fallen victim to unwise reliance on parallels in other languages. In fact neither the Hebrew source (e.g., for TgJob) nor the Greek rendering (e.g., for Tobit) should be considered definitive for the semantics of the Aramaic text. Priority must always be given to the Aramaic context itself and to the use of words in other Aramaic dialects. Consider the word דרה, which means “courtyard (and in the context of royalty ”court” NOT necessarily “courtyard”), but also simply ”dwelling” (for which see the JBA example BT BB 67a(18)” :כי פליגי דאמ׳ ליה٠ דרתא٠ מר סבר בתי משמע ומר סבר תרביצא משם : when do they disagree? (If ) he said to him דרתא; . this one is of the opinion that it means rooms [i.e. the entire property], and the other is of the opinion that it means a courtyard”). At Tobit 7:1 in the phrase יתב קדם תרע דרתה, the word is rendered αὐλῆς in the Greek. But, unlike Cook, we do not take this as proof that the word means “courtyard” in the original, only that this is the rendering chosen by the Greek translator. Another example comes under the entry בר “son”, which admittedly means “children” in the plural but never definitively “child of either sex” in the singular. Yet the Greek at Tobit 3:15
לא ]ב֗ר לה אחרן די י֗ר֗ת֗נ֗[ה] ו֗אח לה ק֗ר֗י֗ב֗ ל[א איתי] ל[ה where the Greek renders with τέκνον and so Cook renders “child of either sex”. Yet surely the context is clear and refers to male heirs! The reverse (converse?) process is illustrated by examples s.v. גבר “man”, where in the final chapter of Job Hebrew איש is so rendered. By telling us that in this context it is shown by the Hebrew that the Aramaic גבר can mean “each one,” as Hebrew (and Aramaic) איש often does to be sure, Cook overlooks the near certainty that the translator’s choice of words was intentional to show that it is only the males that are referred to. Several other similar examples could be cited.

The entries include many dubious readings (always so indicated), such as “בל interj. indeed(?)”, presumably as an aid to readers of the text publications, that probably should have been omitted. Also, forms that occur only as a part of collocations, such as בלי without (properly מן בלי), are given under the single word, a decision that can only mislead those same students.

We found much to comment on in the individual entries, but have limited our notes here to those most important to the learner:

אבע vb. APH to hasten : If the reading is correct and the binyan is indeed aphel, then the effective root is indeed beth, ayin, ayin here, in spite of the etymology.

אוש [Pers.] n. m. advisor (‘voice’) (?): As noted in the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, “It (i.e. אושי) could, however, simply be a personal name or a figurative use of #1 “foundation” > “support” > supporting member of the royal court.”

אן conj. if; not (in oath formula); yes: The word “yes” (< ˀēn < ˀayn) is not the same word as “if” (< ˀin < hinn).

בר אנש man, men, humanity (p. 17): better simply “human being.”

אפו conj. then, and so: This word is an enclitic in rhetorical questions. Neither feature is indicated in the gloss.

ארעי n. f. lower portion, depth: As demonstrated by the cited text (pl. ארעיא), this cannot be a feminine noun but is rather simply the common adjective “lower.”

ב prep. in, on, with, at, by: As an example of the detail Cook provides in the semantic realm, I give here the major divisions by which he has divided his examples:
I. Locative (spatial). (a) in or at a place, without filling it
(b)among (with plural or collective nouns)
(c) in, with a quality or state, adverbial
(d) after verbs of motion, into or onto a place
(e) By, geometrical
II. Temporal. (a) In, during a time indicated by nominal
(b) In, during a time indicated by infinitive
III. Extended Uses: (a) with, comitative
(b) by means of, instrumental
(c) in exchange for, beth pretii (!SAK)
(d) identity or role, with pred. nom
(e) introducing verbal complement (q. v. the verbal roots): verbs of perception, attitude, or disposition:

On the other hand, why the following introductory paragraph is given and to whom it is addressed is a mystery to me:
“[The core relation is “in” an area or container, with most of the extended meanings metaphorical or metonymic developments from this core. The
preposition generally is used in situations of low transitivity; its complement is never the agent of the action, nor an entity that is completely or wholly affected by the action. It often marks the complements of verbs of experience (where the subject is the experiencer of the action), or entities in general that do not undergo a change of state or location. With motion verbs, it generally marks the endpoint of the motion, but not its direction.]”

Under בר II n. m. field, wild country he gives a usage —prep. except for, outside of. But this is incorrect. The preposition is only ברה מן. (See below s.v. המון).

גלגל n. m. sphere: In reference to the moon. Surely the word means a two-dimensional circle, not a three-dimensional sphere here.

גרבי n. m. north: Given that the form שמאל appears in close conjunction in the text, the meaning may rather be something like “northeast” instead.

Under דין one finds essentially hidden the term בעל דין, “opponent at law,” clearly a separate lemma.

As a note s.v. דין II n. m. judge, the student is, as always, given no clue as to the well-known vocalization of the word, yet a gratuitous note is added re the expression דין אמת: “For a parallel in QH, see 11Q5 24:6” , while the important and ubiquitous usage within Judaism as a blessing upon hearing of a death: ברוך דיין אמת is overlooked.

דכא n. f. chamber: Better: “ritual shrine”.

דמי PA. to suppose, believe: “to imagine” is a much more imaginative and accurate rendering.

דמע II n. m. offering: Why not terumah?

דרח “to shine”: There are three forms of this root in the corpus: normative דנח, Hebrew זרח, and this mixed form דרח. Surely a note pointing this out to the student and speculating on possible contextual differences would have been welcome.

הוך vb. PE. to go (impf./inf. only): Surely the reader should have been told what this is suppletive for (ie. הלך)!

המון indep. pers. pron. 3 m. pl. they, them: This form is always a direct object and should not be reconstructed either as a subject or as the object of a preposition (see s.v. בר II n. m. field and חלם II vb.)

הר [BH הר] n. m. mountain: This should not have been included; the entire expression הר סיני is a geographical name here.

הריה n. f. conception, fetus and הריון n. m. conception, pregnancy: Since the same text uses both forms, the meanings are almost certainly different, the first is “fetus”, the second “pregnancy”.

זבד vb. PE. to present: Rather “to provide”.

זמן vb. ITHPA. to meet by intention and זמן [Pers.] n. m. time, occasion; meeting: The idea of “meeting” for this verb comes from the rendering of BH אהל מועד as משכן זמנא here and in the targumic tradition (e.g., at Ex29:4). But this translation is due to the erroneous conception that the Biblical Hebrew term means “tent of meeting”. מועד means “time” just like זמן always does. Also, this word is an Akkadian loan, not Persian. As I demonstrated forty years ago in Akkadian Influences (p. 92), an Iranian etymology is no longer sustainable.

זעק APH. to cry out: Rather pael, for afel makes no sense morphologically or semantically.

חוט n. m. thread, line: Not “line” rather “measuring cord”.

חותל n. m. covering: Rather “swaddling”.

חזיה II n. f. watchtower: Cook’s lengthy note defending his translation is simply wrong. The word in context clearly means “cornerstone”.

חלחלי n.f. trembling, ague(?) : Cook has changed his preference between an earlier draft “entrails” and the published version. He should have stuck with his original intention. However, the variation in forms remains unexplained.

חלם II vb. OPH. to be healed: This reading and interpretation of לבר is impossible (see above s.v. המון).

חלף vb. OPH. to be made to pass across: It is quite possible that the C examples from Qumran are not in fact passives: Note especially the example from 4QEne1.26.19 where the verb is parallel to a C form of רחק which is also widely used as an active.The difference from G would then be G=”pass beyond” while C=”pass by”.

חלץ II n. f. loins, hip: The lemma should be the plural or dual form.

חמד vb. ITHPE./ITHPA. to desire, be desired: The T stem typically means simply “to desire”.

חרגה n. f. terror: This is not a precise rendering. It is rather fear of power and future, not terror or fright.

חרש n. m. sorcery and חרשה n. f. sorcery: All this is dubious and does not comport with other aramaic usages. חרש should be sorcerer (sorcery is חרשין) and חרשה a sorceress.

חשוך n. m. darkness: In the first cited example (אבדן חשוך) it is the adjective, not a noun.

חתן vb. ITHPA. to be married: Rather “to be allied through marriage”, which is quite a different thing altogether.

חתף vb. PE. to rob, raid. He renders here יתון חתפוהי as “his raiders come”. But since when does a Qumran Aramaic imperfect express the general present as in SBH?

יאש vb. PA. to abandon, leave: This is totally incorrect. In this context the piel of this verb means “to console” and it is translating the Hebrew text read as a piel. See the targum to Is 61:3 לְיַאָשָׁא לַאְבֵילֵי צִיוֹן׃ where it is clearly parallel to
לְנַחָמָא.

יבש vb. PE. to wither: By form and usage יביש is an adjective, not a finite verb.

ידי vb. HAPH./APH. to give thanks, acknowledge: Why not “to praise”?

יחל vb. PA. to wait: The Qumran Job passage [for MT לֹא אֶחְבֹּל] seems to reflect the Hebrew of Job 13:15, which itself is a long-standing crux of interpretation; the traditional “I shall wait” is dubious. The verb means “to despair” in Syriac.

יני vb. APH. to vex, trouble. דע מא יונא בעה, know what will trouble one who seeks, 4Q541 fg 24 ii:4. This passage remains troublesome in spite of Cook’s cited article supporting this interpretation, which I find to be totally unacceptable in both syntax and context. I tend to think the earlier interpretation “what Jonah sought” may well be right.

יסור n. m. chastisement, correction: A very unlikely reading and interpretation, since “chastisement” elsewhere is always a plural form.

ירכה n. f. thigh: The singular form is rather ירך, which takes a feminine plural.

ישע [BH] vb. APH. to save, deliver. ויושע, he saved (or: will save): This is not BH, so why would he suggest “he saved” as a first rendering? The context is clearly a pseudo-prediction of the future of Israel.

ישר vb. APH. to send away: Much better “to release”. BH teachers and students: Please do not use the translation “to send” when you translate the BH piel of שלח! It is like chalk screeching on a blackboard to my ears.

כול, כל n. m./quant. any, all, every, each: We find in the divisions of this entry an extreme example of missing the forest for the trees. His categories are count nouns (indet., det.), non-count nouns (indet., det.), relative clauses, alone, and with pronominal suffixes. In so doing, the major semantic distinction from a translational point of view, i.e. when and why it means “every” and when and why it means “all” or “whole” is completely overlooked.

כסי vb.: The entry is missing a potential Dt form, which appears emended s.v. כנס.

כפר n. m. kind of flower. One misses an explanation of why this is a type of flower and not simply kwprˀ, “spadix”.

לבונה n. f. incense: It is rather “frankincense”, which is a particular incense.

לולב n. m. branch: A lulav is a palm branch; since this text is in reference to a grape vine, this must be “support stick” as in CPA. The second example is probably “lulavs”.

לחץ vb. PE. to oppress: Better “to constrain”.

לילא, לילה n. m. night: Here the absence of any guide to vocalization is sure to mislead the Hebrew-knowing student. The absolute is lēlē and probably should have been given as לילי.

לכוש n. m. brazier: it is not a pleasant “brazier” but rather a fire-brand that can burn up everything!

לקח vb. PE. to take: Better “to remove”.

מאין adv. where: This word means “whence”. He tries to justify his rendering (changed from an earlier draft!) with a totally inane argument, including a blatantly incorrect adduction of BH Nahum 3:7 (מֵאַיִן אֲבַקֵּשׁ מְנַחֲמִים לָךְ) as if it supports the meaning “where” in Biblical Hebrew. The sun passes through and sets from the western gates and is then somewhere else from the perspective of the sun and from the perspective of the astronomer. I would have expected better of Cook.

ממר, מאמר [√rma] n. m. command, bidding, word: “command” not “word”.

מאן n. m. vessel: In this context it clearly means “heavenly body” or even “constellation”. His literal translation “vessels of heaven” is makes little sense.

מדינה n. f. land, nation, city: “Land” is never correct. By definition it is a political unit.

מחסן n. m. fortress. מחסניך אתקף, strengthen your fortresses: Might one instead venture “be a man!” See the Syriac meaning “genitalia”.

מטלה n. f. shelter: Taking it from טלל in a broken context, but “burden” (from נטל) is equally possible.

מן prep. from, out of, of: Surely he should have noted that in this orthography the nun is assimilated to a nun-initial word.

מסורה, מסרה [taking from the root אסר ‘to bind’?] n. f. company, array: This is very misleading. It means rather “assignment > assigned group” from the root מסר. Had the “scholars” cited in his note looked at the samaritan dictionary (p. 480) they would know this.

מציעה n. f. middle. The form מצעה is probably a separate word.

מקטורה n. f. incense: This is surely rather incense pan as in hebrew מִקְטֶרֶת and should be given with final taw. There is no reason why “incense” should have a mem preformative. Also, note that his citation of the meaning of the root: [√קטר ‘to give off smoke’] does not comport with the definitions given under the root itself.

מקם n. m. position, office: “Office” surely is misleading in english; he means “position” or “standing”.

משלחה n. f. emissary: Probably rather Hebraic מִשְׁלַחַת.

נגד I vb. PE. to proceed (intrans.), stretch, pull (trans.) and נגד II vb. ITHPE./ITHPA. to be scourged: This is a single root.

נור n. m. fire. His note reads: “When the gender is clear, it is always masc. as in Tg. Onk., although in some other dialects both genders are used”. This is highly misleading, given that there is only one example (ex. 22:5) in Onkelos and the masculine forms there all have feminine variants!

נחיר n. f. nostril: The lemma should be cited as a dual.

נחל n. m. ravine: Not just a ravine. A wadi is a well-known English word these days.

נצץ vb. APH. to produce blossoms. “מנצ בהון, (as if) making blossoms among them”. This is nonsense; read מנצבהון “from their planting”.

נשמין n. m. pl. breath: Probably rather just a plural of common נשמה.

נשר n. m. eagle. As I note in the CAL, the frequent modern rendering as “eagle” is misguided for the Ancient Near East, where a distinction between these two large raptors was not generally made. Most commonly the word would seem to refer to what is now known as the “griffon” vulture (“Gyps Fulvus”). Why the other modern dictionaries continue to put “eagle” first escapes my understanding.

סגר vb. PE. to hand over, deliver: No, this word means “to shut”. It only acquires the connotation “to hand over” when used with ביד.

סדר vb. PE./PA. to follow, come next: At 4Q197 fg 4 i:5 (Tobit 6:1) night (restored!) is said to have סדר להון. Rather than his “to follow, come next”, we would render “appeared as usual”.

סור vb. PE. to turn away, depart. Read instead יסורין.

סתר n. m. secret place, loin: The Syriac text cited in the note is irrelevant for it clearly renders the second half of the verse, not the first.

עבידה n. f. work; servants: The passages justifying the translation “servants” do no such thing. Their context is of building and burying, so whence “servants”?

עופיה n. f. branch: Instead just עופי.

על prep. on, upon, against, concerning. He writes “[The basic function is to indicate a relation of an action or thing to a state or entity that does not exist in or pass into the state or entity, pass by or under it, or issue from it or out of it. Hence the relation so denoted is essentially external, and includes the concepts indicated by English on, over, against, by, next to, towards, above, or conceptually about, for, because of, concerning, regarding.]”: I doubt if such clever gibberish can mean anything at all to the learner. In any case, it hardly describes a “basic function”. Cook seems to be bothered by the fact that he chose to use such a large number of different English words to render a single Aramaic one. But such is the nature of translation. Had he tried a bit harder, though, he could have rendered virtually every textual example with the actual basic function that is a perfectly good multivalent English word: “over”. Try it and see.

ען n. f. flock of sheep: As anyone who has traveled in the Near East knows, this means “sheep and goats” not just “sheep”. This oversight explains his mistranslation of תיש as “ram”, q.v.

קלל n. m. curse and קללה reproach: These should probably be reversed, with the first example cited s.v. קללה almost surely instead restored as כמלתי, i.e. metathesized כלמתי.

קליפין, קלפין n. m. pl. tree bark: This is rather the plural of קלפה.

קץ n. m. time; end: The examples of “end” (קצוי) are from קצה not from קץ.

קשש vb. APH. to cause to enter adulthood, raise. “יקשן בניהן ויפקן, they raise their young and send them away, 11QtgJob 32:3“: In spite of the defectively written ending these verbs are almost certainly simply peals with בניהן as the subject. The apparent feminine forms have been influenced by the previous verse.

רגש vb. HAPH. to stir up (?): More likely “assemble urgently” as in BH.

רחצן n. m. security: Better “reliance, certainty”.

תיש n. m. ram: Never “ram”, rather “he-goat”.

Review, Text Publication

Idumean Ostraca, volume 1

Thoughts on Textbook of Aramaic Ostraca from Idumea, Vol. 1 by Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni (Eisenbrauns, 2014)

Thirty years ago or so, large numbers of unprovenanced Aramaic ostraca from southern Israel began to appear on the antiquities market and were quickly snatched up by the usual rich collectors. Many of these have been published, largely by A. Lemaire. Many have been loaned to museums. Many remain unpublished. Many (published from photographs) can no longer be located. In short, a typical mess caused first and foremost by the ability of site raiders to sell their wares to antiquities dealers who, in turn, can demand substantial prices from collectors who, in turn, enhance the value of their investments by getting certain scholars to publish their holdings. All this is well known and its ramifications repeatedly pondered by museums and scholarly societies and journals for many years now. It is not a problem with an easy solution, neither for museums nor for scholars tempted to participate in the publications. Of collectors, the less said the better.

The corpus of material in question here, from the second half of the 4th century BCE, has come to be known as the Idumean ostraca, a corpus of somewhere around 2,000 ostraca apparently from ancient Makkedah, modern Khirbet el-Kom. The great majority of the documents are brief “commodity chits,” mostly dealing with the delivery of grain. It is with this group of documents that Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni have chosen to begin their publication series of this material with what is an amazingly detailed and handsome volume.

Over 400 such chits are published in the first volume of what is clearly meant to be an extensive series. Herewith a typical example (A5.9 p. 235):

ב19 לסיון שנת 3
קוסלנצר לבני יוכל
למסכנת מנקדה
שך 9 ס 10

The last line of which is to be understood as abbreviations for:
שׁערן כורן 9 סאת 10

thus:

on the 19th of Sivan year 3 (of Artaxerxes III)
PN1 of the sons of PN2
to the storehouse of Makkedah
9 kor, 10 seah of barley

Each text is presented in photograph and hand drawing, transcription and translation, and notes where necessary. There are no indices, but a companion CD is included containing extensive tables of cataloguing material and a tri-color KWIC for the entire corpus. Various charts and tables provide detailed comparative analysis as to date, commodity, payer, payee, and prosopographic studies.

This volume has clearly been prepared with an enormous amount of commitment and effort over a substantial number of years. One might wish that the authors had seen fit to begin their publication with the potentially more interesting documents, i.e. letters and accounts for, frankly, the material in volume 1, for all of the hard work devoted to it, is worth only a single glance for most readers of this blog. The few new words found in the corpus have been known since the initial publications, and I am not at all sure exactly what we are meant to learn from these texts about the society and culture of Idumea at the end of Achaemenid times. Perhaps the most important information here in this respect is to be gleaned by the personal names and the nature of Arabisms in the names and in the vocabulary.

Eisenbrauns is to be praised for producing such a handsome yet complicated volume, especially given the number of color photographs and complicated charts and tables involved (although some of the graphics in the introductory material are more than just a bit ugly I’m afraid). Whether or not a major publisher in our field should publish such a study of unprovenanced material in the first place is a different matter.

I shall leave it to the readers of this blog to provide guidance to the following conundrum: If Porten and Yardeni provide us with an electronic copy of the texts in their new volumes as they are published, should the material be added to the CAL online database? (Previously published materials are available in files 20357 and 20358!) We are certainly not going to type in the data by hand.

Dictionaries, Review

Christian Palestinian Aramaic: A New Dictionary with a text publication

An evaluation of A Dictionary of Christian Palestinian Aramaic by M. Sokoloff, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 235 (Peeters, 2014)

The indefatigable Mike Sokoloff has added a new contribution to his list of modern dictionaries of the important and previously underserved Aramaic dialects, this time for Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a dialect not seriously subject to lexical study since the work of Friedrich Schulthess in his Lexicon Syropalaestinum of 1903 (available here ). New texts have been published since Schulthess’ time, and many of the difficult palimpsest texts scattered among European libraries have been read or reread by Christa Müller-Kessler, so the time was ripe for this effort.

As a companion volume, Sokoloff has also published Texts of Various Contents in Christian Palestinian Aramaic in the same series, consisting of fragmentary texts of various acts and lives of the saints, homilies, and a small collection of epigraphic fragments.
The first thing to note about the publications is that, like the previous volumes published jointly by Müller-Kessler and Sokoloff in the series A Corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic (Groningen: Styx) in the 1990’s, CPA is presented in a font (designed by Müller-Kessler for her grammar and probably used here without proper permissions) that relatively accurately reflects CPA manuscript ductus, but, although basically a version of Estrangelo, is extremely awkward for non-specialists to read with any fluency. To write a dictionary in such a font does a huge disservice to the non-CPA-specialists who will undoubtedly constitute the overwhelming majority of potential users. We can only hope that future lexical contributions, in particular the major reworking of the Mandaic lexicon in the works by M. Morgenstern, will see fit to publish their Aramaic in a font with wider appeal (i.e. square script, Estrangelo or Serto, or transliteration).
The next feature that stands out is that, unlike his Jewish Aramaic dictionaries, where almost every citation is translated (clearly modeled after the practice of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary), and even still often but far from always the case in his reworking of A Syriac Lexicon, here very few of the citations justifying the glosses have merited an English translation. and when the text is glossed it is done in an often confusing manner. Consider the following citation under the lemma byṣypw(tˀ) adv. s.v. yṣypw. n.f., eagerly, diligently (p. 165a):
hw qqnh byṣypw npq lˀwrˁwth Prod2 5:2 (approached him; προθυμῶς)
Apparently one is to interpret this guidance to tell us that the adverb here modifies “approached him” and corresponds to the Greek word προθυμῶς “eagerly”.
This example takes us to the most serious indeed critical flaw in the lexicon, as illustrated by the second gloss in the same entry: with haste. Now our word is obviously based on the common Aramaic root YṢP, “to be concerned, take care” and has nothing to do with “haste”. so why “with haste”? Because the corresponding Greek equivalent in the text here translated is μετὰ σπουδῆς whose first definition in Greek dictionaries is “with haste”. But it also can mean “eagerly”, so why is this a new gloss? The obvious initial solution to this question must reflect on the speed with which Sokoloff does his work. Clearly one can say in more ways than one that yṣypw is not properly reflected in this entry.
But a second and even more serious flaw is illustrated here, and it is clear that he has learned this egregiously false method from his work on Brockelmann’s mammoth volume: Texts translated from Greek into Aramaic in antiquity do not always render literally, no more than the Septuagint renders the Hebrew bible literally even when the Urtext is clearly the same as the MT. Hundreds if not thousands of times Brockelmann justified a rather strange gloss for the Syriac by allusion to the Greek it was supposedly translating. To take a striking example here witness br gns glossed (p. 59, this one under br not gns!) as one of the same age, though the same phrase simply means something like “relative” in Syriac. Yet at Galatians 1:14 it is used where the Greek has συνηλικιώτας. Surely the CPA expression no more means “same age ones” than does the King James rendering “my equals” at the same passage.

A final criticism must be saved for Sokoloff’s penchant for creating multi-word lexical collocations, a practice he began with his JPA lexicon but here has expanded it in a truly extensive way. All lexemes can vary semantically when combined with others, but the proper way to do lexical analysis on such collocations is to abstract the shared semantics of similar collocations and enter the appropriate gloss in the main entry and/or to list the various collocations by semantics rather than a meaningless alphabetic arrangement.
When all is said and done, though, we needed this book. A corrective, detailed review by someone qualified in patristic Greek would be most welcome.
As for the text volume, whose format follows that of the earlier Styx volumes, the most intriguing thing to be said about it is that it contains a lengthy appendix consisting of revised translations of the material published in the earlier, joint volumes. From this fact alone, this reader cannot but help get the impression that all is not quite as certain as the specialists would have us believe when it comes to reading CPA palimpsests.