לשונה וסגנונה של מסכת אבות לדורותיה (Language and Style of Tractate Avoth Through the Ages.) (review)

Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 397 Reviews detailed historical critical assessment of ARN and its relationship to other rabbinic texts. More problematic than any deficiencies on the part of Schofer are a number of decisions by the press that in the end seriously detract from this book’s usefulness. Inasmuch as so much of the argumentation of this book occurs in the notes, almost any serious reader of this work will be frustrated by the publisher’s decision to place them as endnotes. Even more upsetting is that no one indexed the vast corpus of notes rendering them much less useful to scholars. I am all in favor of making books more accessible when possible, however, in this case the publisher’s decisions have hurt this book’s most likely market, scholars who would want to make use of his detailed and sophisticated argumentation. None of these editorial criticisms nor the more minor concerns about Schofer’s choice of how best to analyze this corpus should overshadow Schofer’s great accomplishment. He has produced a cutting edge study of a central rabbinic text that not only models how one ought to conduct scholarship but in the process brings the text of ARN alive to reader’s today. Joel S. Kaminsky Smith College Northampton, MA 01063 jkaminsk@smith.edu hytwrwdl twba tksm lC hnwngsw hnwCl. (Language and Style of Tractate Avoth Through the Ages.) By Shimon Sharvit. Pp 280. Beer Sheva: BenGurion University of the Negev, 2006. Cloth, $22.17. This book by Sharvit follows a critical edition to this tractate published by the author (Sharvit Shimon, Tractate Avoth Through the Ages: A Critical Edition, Prolegomena and Appendices, Jerusalem [2004]). Sharvit is one of the prominent scholars in the field of Mishnaic Hebrew, and his research on some topics in the areas of phonology and syntax of Mishnaic Hebrew is among the most prominent in these fields. Therefore, having a new book by Sharvit on the language and style of one tractate of the Mishnah is most significant for this field of research. Choosing to concentrate on one tractate of the Mishnah in a linguistic description is usually a result of time constraints. However this is definitely not the case when dealing with Avoth. This tractate is distinguished from the other parts of the Mishnah by its content, and consequently by its style and language as well. While the rest of the Mishnah deals mostly with legal issues, one cannot find these topics in Avoth. In a sense, Avoth is closer to the biblical and post-biblical wisdom literature, and consists of short words Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 398 Reviews of wisdom and moral instructions (pp. 19–20), consequently it is written in a poetic language and closer in its style to biblical and post-biblical literature (pp. 20–31). Therefore, from a linguistic point of view, it is important to examine the grammar of this text and to evaluate its relationship with the grammar of the rest of the Mishnah. At the same time it is essential to inquire whether Avoth’s grammar, relatively to the other parts of the Mishnah, is closer to Biblical Hebrew in general or at least to its later manifestations. After examining morphological issues, such as the forms of the infinitives (forms like Ntyl as opposed to the biblical form ttl); the form of the 3rd f sg suffix form in III-y verbs (in which there is a clear distinction between the Biblical Hebrew forms: htyh ,htnb and the Mishnaic Hebrew forms tyyh ,tnb); syntactical issues, such as the uses of the verb HYY as an auxiliary verb in compound verbs with a participle, a productive phenomenon in Mishnaic Hebrew; and scrutinizing carefully lexical items in which Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew differ significantly, Sharvit concludes that the language of this tractate is clearly similar to the rest of the Mishnah (pp. 32–42). However, its relative kinship to the Bible is not merely restricted to the content. The few occurrences of biblical forms, which ceased to be productive in Mishnaic Hebrew, such as short forms of the prefix conjugation (e.g., yhy ,Cot la), within the Mishnah, appear almost exclusively in Avoth. Yet these...