Semitic Studies in Memory of Moshe Held. Janes 19 (review)

Abstract

Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 124 Reviews In other words, he is saying that he is not interested in earlier versions of the text but is interested in the historical context from which the text was born-the linguistic context, the ideological context, etc. He reads the book of Job in its antiquity (p. 182). It is hard to fault this, but, again, what does it do to indeterminacy? Will Good admit to limits on interpretive possibilities ? Well, perhaps we should not be troubled by such lack of consistency. Good certainly is not. His model of reading is "playful eroticism " (p. 180), and he ends with "The world is full of jokes. Religion is only one of them" (p. 397). He thus undermines the seriousness of his project. If he does not take himself seriously, perhaps we should not either. Adele Berlin University ofMaryland College Park, MD 20742 SEMITIC STUDIES IN MEMORY OF MOSHE HELD. JANES 19. Edward L. Greenstein and David Marcus, eds. Pp. viii + 181. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1989. Paper. Moshe Held published relatively little during his lifetime, but his substantial contributions to ancient Near Eastern philology, through the vehicle of his students and through his presentations and responses at scholarly meetings, far outweigh those published words. It is quite fitting, then, that he has now been memorialized in three separate volumes. Senior colleagues contributed to an issue of JQR (76/1 [1985]), Israeli colleagues and students to an issue of Beer-sheva (3 [1988]). The current volume consists of contributions from sixteen scholars who earned their Ph.D. degrees under Held (approximately three-fourths of the total number of doctorates he produced) and may be said, therefore, to be a reflection of his "school." It begins with a list of Held's major publications and a twopage appreciation by the editors. In an article given orally on several earlier occasions, Chaim Cohen attempts to define "The 'Held Method' for Comparative Semitic Philology"a "method" the reviewer recalls having seen elsewhere referred to as "the Landsberger-Held method." The article contains a useful list of sixty-four of Held's published "interdialectal distributions." Cohen's own contribution to the list, the suggestion to understand Imbwl of Ps 29:10 as equivalent to Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 125 Reviews Akkadian 16m abiibi, fails to convince, in spite of its having been arrived at (independently?) by W. W. Hallo. In "The Father of Modem Biblical Scholarship," R. David Freedman argues that Spinoza took most of his ideas from the anti-Jewish polemics of the eleventh-century Muslim theologian Ibn Hazm. In "Another Model for Ezekiel's Abnormalities," Stephen Garfinkel connects the prophet's dumbness and "binding" with references to divinely imposed illnesses in Akkadian incantations and wisdom literature. Mayer I. Gruber treats "Breast-Feeding Practices in Biblical Israel and in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia" in a comprehensive, twenty-three page article. Murray H. Lichtenstein discusses a problematic verse in "Idiom, Rhetoric and the Text of Genesis 41:16." Of particular interest to Hebraists is Edward L. Greenstein's treatment of "The Syntax of Saying 'Yes' in Biblical Hebrew." He points out that in biblical Hebrew, as in other languages, questions are generally answered by repetition of the key word-a process he terms "deletion." In "The Bargaining between Jephthah and the Elders (Judges 11 :4-11)," David Marcus argues convincingly that the "negotiations between the elders and Jephthah did not center around the level of Jephthah's appointment..." but rather "a dispute over Jephthah's disinheritance." In "The'Accession Year' and Davidic Chronology," Eugene H. Merrill attempts to demonstrate that the events narrated in 2 Samuel about David's Jerusalem years are arranged in other than chronological order. In a truly non-Heldian contribution, "Divine Names in the Book of Psalms: Literary Structures and Number Patterns," Ronald Youngblood argues that the number of times a particular divine name appears and the sequences thereof in units of the Psalter are significant. A few of the papers are not centered on the Hebrew Bible. Ichiro Nakata offers a comprehensive study of the institution of sugaglItum at Mari; Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat provides the very useful "A Bibliography of Cuneiform Mathematical Texts," and...