Scholarly Dictionaries of Two Dialects of Jewish Aramaic

Abstract

The two dictionaries under review represent the product of decades of assiduous research and persistent effort on the part of Professor Michael Sokoloff of Bar Ilan University. Previoiusly, he has contributed major works in the Aramaic field in collaboration with other scholars. There is, first of all, A Corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic (Gröningen: Styx Publications, 1997), a multivolume edition of texts prepared in collaboration with Christa Müller-Kessler. This was followed by a Hebrew work, [Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity] (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of the Sciences and Humanities, 1999), prepared in collaboration with Joseph Yahalom. However, the dictionaries reviewed here, which represent his most ambitious projects, bear his name alone, with only technical and electronic assistance in their actual preparation provided on the part of others. Sokoloff has also published A Dictionary of Judean Aramaic (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 2003), covering sources from 150 BCE to 200 CE, which includes the rich material preserved in the Aramaic papyri from the Judean Desert.