A Dictionary of Judean Aramaic (review)

Hebrew Studies 46 (2005) 387 Reviews The book is entitled “A Guide to Biblical Hebrew Syntax,” but in their section on particles, the syntactic behaviour of most of the particles is ignored. A good example in this case is their purely semantic description of Mg, in which the semantic distinctions they describe primarily correspond to English translation equivalents. In the case of the prepositions, semantic categories are listed without any sensitivity to the primarily spatial functions of prepositions. This is important for a work such as this one, since it often helps students to keep the related functions together. As far as their section on “clauses and sentences” is concerned, the translation values of clauses and sentences are again used as the primary criteria for classification. This has led, among other things, to their lack of distinguishing between Yes/No questions and WH questions (p. 187), the lumping together of phrases under the heading of clauses (pp. 177 and 186), and so on. Although they do make reference to the functions of the sequential ordering of sentence constituents, their descriptions in this regard reflect none of the major strides made in recent years concerning the interpretation of Biblical Hebrew word order. To conclude, current research in Biblical Hebrew has without doubt much to offer students and exegetes of the Hebrew Bible. However, I do not think that Arnold and Choi’s book represents an effective means of providing access to those insights. Christo H. J. van der Merwe University of Stellenbosch Matieland, South Africa cvdm@sun.ac.za. A DICTIONARY OF JUDEAN ARAMAIC. By Michael Sokoloff. Pp. 88. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2003. Cloth, $25.00. The corpus of this dictionary—Professor Sokoloff’s third of Aramaic— includes the Aramaic texts from the areas around the Dead Sea (especially Nah .al H . ever, Wadi Murabbafiat, and Masada), the small corpus of inscriptions (mostly of a funerary nature) from Jerusalem and its surrounding area, and scattered passages from the Mishna, Tosefta, midrashim, and Megillat Tafianit. Dead Sea Scrolls are excluded, with a few exceptions (e.g., 4Q342– 4Q345, 4Q542); however, only some words from these texts appear in the lexicon (see below). The included texts date from roughly 165 B.C.E. to 200 C.E., that is, from an earlier period than was covered in Sokoloff’s much larger (847 pages) Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (2d ed.; RamatGan : Bar Ilan University Press, 2002). The reader wishes that the author Hebrew Studies 46 (2005) 388 Reviews would have defined more explicitly how he chose the texts that are included in, or excluded from, this dictionary. The only way to get a complete sense of what is included is to read through the abbreviations section (pp. 11–18). This volume is quite slim, the dictionary itself taking up only sixty pages. Some might suggest that this small amount of material could easily have been incorporated into the larger dictionary mentioned above. However, separating this material was done purposefully, as a reaction to most other dictionaries of Aramaic in which two or more dialects are mixed together. Keeping this (or any) dialect corpus separate allows one to more clearly understand how the Aramaic language changed over time. In addition, it provides greater convenience for dialectal investigations. The dictionary itself (pp. 29–88) is structured very clearly, in an identical manner to that of his two previous dictionaries of Aramaic. Following the entry head are any variant forms and, for some nouns, the determined or plural form. References to other entries are given where appropriate. Etymologies and cognates are not given, except in cases where the word is a loan from Akkadian (e.g., rxm), Greek (e.g., rnyd), or Arabic (e.g., Pxw). Quite often he gives equivalent forms in other Aramaic dialects, though usually not more than two. He also often refers (by page number) to the corresponding entry in Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, in which more Aramaic dialect forms and additional references to the literature are provided. This constant reference to the Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic makes the Dictionary of Judean Aramaic somewhat dependent on the former. It is unclear whether entries are intended to be comprehensive...