Books in the Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic series

An analysis of the Hebrew Bible's non-Semitic terminology, providing insight into foreign contact in ancient Israel.

More than 80 years have passed since Bauer and Leander's historical grammar of Biblical Hebrew was published, and many advances in comparative historical grammar have been made during the interim. Joshua Blau, who has for much of his life been associated with the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem, has during the past half century studied, collected data, and written frequently on various aspects of the Hebrew language. Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew had its origins in an introduction to Biblical Hebrew first written some 40 years ago; it has now been translated from Modern Hebrew, thoroughly revised and updated, and it distills a lifetime of knowledge of the topic. The book begins with a 60-page introduction that locates Biblical Hebrew in the Semitic family of languages. It then discusses various approaches to categorization and classification, introduces and discusses various linguistic approaches and features that are necessary to the discussion, and provides a background to the way that linguists approach a language such as Biblical Hebrew-all of which will be useful to students who have taken first-year Hebrew as well those who have studied Biblical Hebrew extensively but have not been introduced to linguistic study of the topic. After a brief discussion of phonetics, the main portion of the book is devoted to phonology and to morphology. In the section on phonology, Blau provides complete coverage of the consonant and vowel systems of Biblical Hebrew and of the factors that have affected both systems. In the section on morphology, he discusses the parts of speech (pronouns, verbs, nouns, numerals) and includes brief comments on the prepositions and waw. The historical processes affecting each feature are explained as Blau progresses through the various sections. The book concludes with a complete set of paradigms and extensive indexes. Blau's recognized preeminence as a Hebraist and Arabist as well as his understanding of language change have converged in the production of this volume to provide an invaluable tool for the comparative and historical study of Biblical Hebrew phonology and morphology.

In Biblical Hebrew Grammar Visualized, Andersen and Forbes approach the grammar of Biblical Hebrew from the perspective of corpus linguistics. Their pictorial representations of the clauses making up the biblical texts show the grammatical functions (subject, object, and so on) and semantic roles (surrogate, time interval, and so on) of clausal constituents, as well as the grammatical relations that bind the constituents into coherent structures.The book carefully introduces the Andersen-Forbes approach to text preparation and characterization. It describes and tallies the kinds of phrases and clauses encountered across all of Biblical Hebrew. It classifies and gives examples of the major constituents that form clauses, focusing especially on the grammatical functions and semantic roles. The book presents the structures of the constituents and uses their patterns of incidence both to examine constituent order (“word order”) and to characterize the relations among verb corpora. It expounds in detail the characteristics of quasiverbals, verbless clauses, discontinuous and double-duty clausal constituents, and supra-clausal structures.The book is intended for students of Biblical Hebrew at all levels. Beginning students will readily grasp the basic grammatical structures making up the clauses, because these are few and fairly simple. Intermediate and advanced students will profit from the detailed descriptions and comparative analyses of all of the structures making up the biblical texts. Scholars will find fresh ways of addressing open problems, while gaining glimpses of new research approaches and topics along the way.

A diachronic and synchronic account of the verb morphology and phonology of Aramaic, a subfamily of Semitic, from its appearance in history early in the first millennium BCE until approximately the second millennium CE.

An application of functional linguistic theory to the book of Judges in order to evaluate the characters and their actions in their historical context and determine whether their actions are normative or aberrant based on evidence in the text itself.