עברית מקראית במרחב השמי הצפון-מערבי היבטים טיפולוגיים והיסטוריים

The twenty papers reviewed here were presented at the conference of the international research group devoted to Biblical Hebrew in Its Northwest Semitic Setting (Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, 2001–2 academic year). The first paper, by Moshe Bar-Asher, presents a new, previously unidentified grammatical category: the qal passive participle of geminate verbs. Joshua Blau puts forth a new theory regarding the origin of the Arabic diptote declension. Using archeological and epigraphic evidence regarding ancient scribal traditions in the first millennium B.C.E., John A. Emerton discusses the writing of history in the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Steven E. Fassberg treats sequences of positive commands of the type לך אמר,לך ואמרת,הלוך ואמרת in biblical Hebrew, and discusses their meaning and distribution. W. Randall Garr writes on the paragogic nun. Edward L. Greenstein talks about the form and function of finite verbs in Ugaritic epic. John Huehnergard reconsiders the etymology of the Hebrew relative še-. Avi Hurvitz discusses the linguistic history of the prostration formula and analyzes its single biblical occurrence, where it is accompanied by the prepositional phrase על-הרצפה. Jan Joosten, in the following paper, assumes the existence of iterative weqatal in classical biblical Hebrew, and accordingly postulates its disappearance in later stages. Menaḥem Zevi Kaddari addresses the representation of homonymy and polysemy in a new modern Hebrew lexicon of the Hebrew Bible. Geoffrey Khan suggests that the third-person independent personal pronouns in nominal clauses in biblical Hebrew are in a transitional stage, and display certain traits of a copula. Based on epigraphic evidence, André Lemaire discusses sociohistorical aspects of Hebrew and Aramaic in the first millennium B.C.E. and describes the multilingualism common in the ancient Near East. André Lemaire and Ada Yardeni jointly publish nineteen new Hebrew, and one Phoenician, ostraca from the Shephelah belonging to a private collector. Mordechay Mishor identifies many Aramaic features in the language of Jethro the Midianite in Exodus 18, and suggests that they are a literary means of marking a foreign language. Based on a restricted corpus of main declarative finite clauses in Genesis, Adina Moshavi attempts to demonstrate that the discourse functions of object/adverbial fronting in biblical Hebrew are focusing and topicalization. Alviero Niccacci reconsiders the functions of the verbal forms in biblical Hebrew poetry. M. O'Connor suggests that the eccentricity of most proper names of human characters in Ugaritic epic is a literary means, noting the exceptionality of the name Daniel. Frank H. Polak treats the linguistic and stylistic aspects of several epic formulas, such as,וישא עיניו וירא (והנה) in ancient Semitic poetry and biblical narrative. Elisha Qimron employs a comparative historical method to explain why the pataḥ does not become a qamaṣ in pause in biblical Hebrew. Finally, Gary A. Rendsburg uses linguistic evidence from the Song of Songs to propose that its language was related to a dialect used in northern Israel, which he labels 'Israelien Hebrew'. Although the book lacks indexes, a unified bibliography, and a list of abbreviations, it remains an important contribution to the ongoing research of biblical Hebrew, especially in connection to Northwest Semitic and Semitic languages in general.