The composition of Deut 27-28 is shaped by its ritual and performative function and by the narrative device of a script within a speech: the oral and ritual performance of the covenant ceremony by the Levites is framed within the speech-command of Moses. Studies of Deut 28 have …
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This study analyzes three unmarked-marked verbal pairs that exist in the Neo-Aramaic dialects of Christian Barwar and Christian Urmi. Each pair is analyzed for the opposing forms’ formal and functional differences, with an emphasis on function. It is argued that despite the fact…
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the largest of the Palestinian targums, translates the Pentateuch into Aramaic. Incorporated within its translation is interpretative material. As the latest Palestinian Targum, it includes interpretations found in earlier Palestinian targums as well as i…
This dissertation examines the application of pragmatics (especially, the study of politeness), biblical studies and Semitic philology to a selected group of ancient texts that use a characteristic set of deferential strategies. The following strategies are studied: Vocatives, T…
This dissertation provides an analysis of the 963 verse entries of Fragment-Targum MS. Vatican Ebr. 440 (Targum V), a Palestinian Targum which contains (at least portions of) only one-sixth of the verses of the Pentateuch. The raison d'etre of the Fragment-Targums is one of the …
Contemporary scholars generally translate the Hebrew stem znh as “prostitute” or “cultic prostitute” and understand it as a metaphor for Israel's alleged apostasy. However prostitution in the Biblical texts is neither punished nor censured making this a weak metaphor for prophet…
A long history of studies exists of how Hebrew and Aramaic influenced NT Greek. Many deal specifically with the Semitic background to the Fourth Gospel. These are flawed, however, by (1) a lack of precision in selection of Greek and Semitic sources used for comparative purposes,…
The Neo-Assyrian and Aramaic bilingual inscription from Fekheriyeh, a typical exemplar of ancient monumental inscriptions commemorating the dedication of Had(d)-yit'i's statue to Hadad of Sikan, is a significant new additional source for the study of the ancient Near East during…
This dissertation is the first account of a previously undocumented dialect of Neo-Mandaic, a Semitic language belonging to the Eastern subgroup of Aramaic. It is the most detailed description of any dialect of Neo-Mandaic. The data contained within this dissertation was collect…
This study focuses on the legal formularies used in Aramaic deeds of conveyances from antiquity and asks the following two questions: (1) based on these documents, can we speak of a discrete Aramaic legal tradition, and (2) if we can do so, whence and how did this tradition aris…
Aramaic was one of the most widely used languages of the ancient Near East. Although most of the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran are written in Hebrew, a small number use a variety of Aramaic. All of Qumran Aramaic (QA) has reached published form, though a few minor manuscripts hav…
My dissertation has two goals: the first is to prove that historical syntax has a value in subgrouping; the second is to reconstruct parts of the syntax of the Aramaic dialect groups. The work focuses on three topics: the development of adverbial subordination, nominal modifiers…
Aramaic offers some of the richest sources of dialectal variation within the Semitic language family. Yet comparative dialectal studies in Aramaic syntax are virtually non-existent. The purpose of this dissertation is to exploit the fact of multiple Aramaic translations of the b…
The title of this dissertation is "The Verbal System of Biblical Aramaic: A Distributional Approach." The thesis is that Biblical Aramaic has a primary verbal form for narration and a primary verbal form for discourse. The qtl form presents the foreground of narration, and the y…
This dissertation attempts to identify the influence of the Old Persian language on the Biblical Aramaic of Daniel. After an introduction to the topic, four possible calques (loan translations) were examined and rated. The first involved the common narrative concatenators be'day…
This dissertation argues that the biblical writers stylistically represented the speech of Arameans and Trans-Jordanians in biblical prose. Although there are a few obvious examples of style-switching in the Hebrew Bible (Gen 31:47; Judg 12:6), this study argues that there are m…
The often fragmentary Aramaic texts preserved by the Qumran community represent a large collection of well edited texts, whose publications have triggered numerous contributions that have brought a significantly clearer understanding of them. Little attention, however, has been …
Greek-Aramaic bilingualism was wide-spread throughout Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia. Among the various Aramaic dialects, Syriac underwent a particularly intense and prolonged period of contact with Greek. This contact led to changes in both languages. The present study prov…
The morphological marking, or non-marking, of the definiteness of a noun phrase in the Aramaic language has changed over time. At the time of Imperial Aramaic (IA) the emphatic state of the noun was used to indicate definiteness, a usage that was passed on to other dialects due …