Studies in Hebrew and Jewish Languages Presented to Shelomo Morag (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS STUDIES IN HEBREW AND JEWISH LANGUAGES PRE· SENTED TO SHELOMO MORAG. Moshe Bar-Asher, ed. Pp. 552 (Hebrew) + *189 (English). Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Bialik Institute, 1996. Cloth. Professor Shelomo Morag has dominated Hebrew language studies for the last few decades. He has made valuable contributions in the research of many aspects of Hebrew and also of other Semitic languages, especially Jewish Aramaic. The main focus of his work has been on the transmission of language in the various Jewish reading traditions. This volume brings together forty-one articles (thirty-one in Hebrew and ten in English) by leading scholars in the many fields of Professor Morag's research. In the depth and breadth of their scholarship, they are a fitting tribute to the work and inspiration of the honorand. The Hebrew section opens with an appreciation of the work of Professor Morag by Moshe Bar-Asher. The scholarly publications reflect only a part of his activities. He wrote numerous articles for the Israeli press, mainly on subjects of his scholarly expertise. The development of modem Hebrew owes much to him, on account of his many contributions to the work of the Hebrew Language Academy. His language traditions project, the aim of which has been to record living oral traditions of Jewish languages , will be an important source for research for generations of future scholars. This is followed by reminiscences by Professor Morag himself concerning his life and work. Of particular interest is his description of the early days of the Hebrew University, when he was a young student. The introductory section closes with a bibliography of the writings of Professor Morag compiled by Anat Tsairi. The Hebrew articles are divided into a section on "Hebrew and Aramaic studies" and one on "Language traditions and modem Jewish languages." The first section opens with an examination by Dan Eldar of the polemical debates on Hebrew grammar between the medieval Spanish grammarian Ibn Janatt and his contemporary Samuel ha-Nagid. He discusses in a characteristically thorough fashion a newly discovered Genizah fragment of one of the polemical grammatical treatises of Ibn Janatt, Kiliib alTashwir ("The book of putting to shame"), which casts new light on these debates, especially through its description of the grammatical ideas of Samuel ha-Nagid, the details of which were not known previously. Yoel Elitzur offers new evidence from topographical names of the phonetic shift of 6 and e in Canaanite languages in the biblical period. Scholars have recognized evidence of this shift in various toponyms and personal names Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 260 Reviews (e.g., Yehoshua ' > Yeshua '). The new evidence includes the toponyms Haifa, 'Akko, Dibon and So'ar, the last two of which are in Moab. The interchange can be traced back as far as the second millennium B.C.E. Joshua BIau studies the background of a number of words in Rabbinical Hebrew with Aramaic morphological patterns. He focuses on the verbal form 'ittaph'al and the nominalpa'lan. He argues convincingly that these arose as a result of the transfer of the abstract Aramaic patterns into Hebrew and not by the loan of Aramaic lexical items. This has important implications for the general debate concerning the contact between the two languages. Avi Hurvitz presents a useful overview of recent scholarly opinions concerning the presence of 'Aramaisms' in the Hebrew Bible. The opinion that all Aramaisms reflect a late linguistic layer of biblical Hebrew is no longer tenable. A number of Aramaisms are found in the early parts of the Bible, where they should be interpreted as features of the Northern dialect of Hebrew or an attempt to give a foreign feel to a narrative concerning Aramaeans. Abraham Tal studies in detail the rabbinic and medieval interpretations of the term for a bodily defect meroal) 'a'Sekh (Lev 21 :20). He skillfully untangles the multiplicity of intermeshing traditions and explains their background. Israel Yeivin examines the Hebrew of early liturgical poetry (piyyutim), with special attention to its morphology, on the basis of early manuscripts, mainly from the Genizah. He argues that the language of this type of literature is more than an artificial pastiche of elements borrowed from earlier...