The qameṣ (*/aː/ > [ɔː]) shift in Palestinian Hebrew: data, dating, and diffusion

The biblical poem entitled Shir Ha-Shirim (The Song of Songs) composed by Shlomo, the third King of the united tribes of Israel about 1,000 years before the Common Era was composed in Hebrew. However, it was also translated and sung by numerous bards in ancient Arabic dialects, as well as being translated to Kurmanji Kurdish. The King composed this poem to substantiate the primeval identity of his kingdom and its connection to the expanses leading up to Jerusalem and the mountain range surrounding Jerusalem. The poem’s underlying meaning leans on the King’s knowledge of the ancient science of Kabbalah. The eight chapters included in the Hebrew Bible as debated in the first century CE, and recorded by the mishnaic Sages of Tiberias in the second century CE, now constitute what we have on record of the Song of Songs. The external shell of the poem, the first chapter of which mentions apple-wine and love, and tribal ethics, symbolizes and reminds of the first moment of love’s intoxication and knowledge. The King is mentioned in the Qur’an as the prophet Suleimān and is known in English as King Solomon. This study ends with an original translation of the Song of Songs with Notes.

What is the best way to refer to the collection of books treated in this volume? Answering that question is tricky, controversial, and revealing. Perhaps in no other discipline is there as much confusion and disagreement about what to call its own subject matter. Old Testament? Hebrew Bible? First Testament? Jewish Scripture? Tanakh? The profusion of proposed titles has resulted not only from a well-intentioned sensitivity to sociological diversity but also from an increased awareness of the fundamentally tradition-specific nature of this literature. Thus, the deeper question at stake in the current clash of titles is whose literature this collection is supposed to be. Because there is not simply one answer to this question, there is also not only one answer to the question of what to call it. Sometimes it is claimed that only with the “New” Testament did Jewish Scripture become “old.” Indeed, as far as can be determined, the term “Old Testament” first appears toward the end of the second century CE as a literary title. After receiving an inquiry about the proper scope of Jewish Scripture (c. 170 CE), Melito, Bishop of Sardis, describes how he journeyed eastward to learn more accurately “the books of the old covenant” ( ta tēs palaias diathēkēs biblia ). However, the terms “new covenant” and “old covenant” already appear in the Bible itself, although there they designate the divine-human relation more broadly, particularly with regard to legal obedience, and not exclusively a written document. The book of Jeremiah envisions a “new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah” in which the law will become so internalized that instruction is no longer necessary (Jer 31:31–4). This “new covenant” is treated in the New Testament as having been fulfilled in Christ (Luke 22:20; 1 Cor 11:25; Heb 8:8, 13; 9:15; 12:24). Correspondingly, the term “old covenant” appears in the New Testament as a designation for Jewish biblical law (2 Cor 3:14; Heb 9:1). Toward the end of the second century CE, Tertullian renders the Greek term “covenant” ( diathēkē ) by the Latin testamentum (“will”), a translation that reflects a growing association between “covenant” as a historical mode of divine-human interaction and “covenant” as a written record. So there is no reason to view the late second-century usage of “Old Testament” as representing any major innovation.

The twenty-four books that now constitute the Hebrew (and Aramaic) Bible or Protestant Old Testament (in which they are counted as thirty-nine books) were written at various times during the last millennium BCE. Scholars debate when certain parts of the Hebrew Bible were written or compiled, but there is general agreement that the last book to be completed was Daniel in c. 165 BCE. No original manuscript of any scriptural book has survived to the present. The first section of this chapter will survey the extant textual evidence for the Hebrew Bible. TEXTS This first section will describe the witnesses that have been available and studied for centuries, while the second section will treat the evidence discovered during the twentieth century in the Judean wilderness. A. The traditional witnesses. The texts of all the books in the Hebrew Bible have long been known through two witnesses: the Masoretic Text (MT) and the Septuagint (LXX); the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) has offered another ancient witness to the first five books. In addition, some other early versions that were at least in part based on Hebrew models have also been considered of value for the preservation and study of the text. 1. The Masoretic Text (MT) . The traditional text of the Hebrew Bible is named the Masoretic Text because of the masora , or body of notes regarding its copying and reading, that was compiled to assist in transmitting it accurately. The MT consists of two parts: the consonantal component, which was the only element at first and which rests on much earlier manuscripts, and the vowels, accents, cantillation marks, and other notes that were added to the consonants by medieval Jewish experts called the Masoretes . The earliest copies of the MT or parts of it date from the ninth and tenth centuries CE or shortly after: the Cairo Codex of the Prophets was copied in 896 CE, the Aleppo Codex (about three-quarters of the Hebrew Bible is preserved in the damaged copy) in c. 925 CE, and the Leningrad Codex (the entire Bible) in 1009 CE. In other words, the very earliest manuscripts are a full 1000 years and more distant in time from when the last book of the Bible reached completion.

Benjamin Kantor investigates the attestations of the wayyiqṭol form in ancient Greek and Latin transcriptions of Biblical Hebrew and compares those attestations with medieval Jewish traditions of Biblical Hebrew (Tiberian, Babylonian) and with the Samaritan tradition. It is shown that the Greek and Latin transcriptions help us understand the development of the later Jewish and Samaritan traditions. By the time of Jerome’s transcriptions (fourth/fifth century CE), the gemination following the initial wa- is generalised, whereas earlier, in Origen’s Secunda (circa first–third centuries CE), it is not fully developed. In the Samaritan tradition there is no trace of this kind of gemination. The article reaches the important conclusion that gemination in wayyiqṭol is a development of the Second Temple Jewish traditions, but not the Samaritan tradition

Presently, most scholars hold that the linguistic status of Rabbinic Hebrew from Byzantine Palestine (380-640 ce) is that of a dead literary language, influenced by Aramaic and earlier varieties of Hebrew, and that Hebrew had already died out as a spoken vernacular in the second or early third century ce. The sources for this variety are rabbinic texts produced by the Palestinian Amoraim and to a lesser degree, epigraphy. The article challenges this view, claiming that such opinions have not been based on a systematic morphosyntactic examination of Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew. The article presents such an analysis of a morphosyntactic structure, namely, pseudo-coordinated verb pairs. Two sub-structures are examined: (I) imperative + imperative and (II) imperative + yiqtol, in Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew, Tannaitic Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew is found to clearly align with Tannaitic Hebrew, and not Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic.

<i>Clio’s Other Sons: Berossus and Manetho</i>. By John Dillery. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Pp. [xxxviii] + 494.

The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was one of the major events in the history of the world. In Judaea and Galilee, when Christianity first emerged in the first century CE, most educated people spoke Greek, and the Bible in Hebrew was the preserve of a few. It seems that even the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, an older contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, knew little or no Hebrew and used only Greek. The date of the translation in 281 BCE indicates the identity of the king who established the library in Alexandria, and the identity of the first chief librarian he employed. The short period of time between the beginning of the reign of Ptolemy II and the date of the translation deduced in this book suggests that the library was built by Ptolemy I who appointed Demetrius of Phalerum as the librarian in charge.Keywords: Alexandria; Christianity; Greek; Hebrew Bible; Jewish philosopher Philo; Ptolemy II

This index presents a list of modern authors, ancient sources and subjects relevant to the study of the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was one of the major events in the history of the world. In Judaea and Galilee, when Christianity first emerged in the first century CE, most educated people spoke Greek, and the Bible in Hebrew was the preserve of a few. It seems that even the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, an older contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, knew little or no Hebrew and used only Greek.Keywords: Christianity; Greek; Hebrew Bible; Philo of Alexandria

This chapter explores the origin and order of the Writings along with their emergence from the larger corpus of prophets included in the Hebrew Bible. It focuses also on the somewhat mixed reception of some of those texts in Judaism and early Christianity as well as the tripartite structure of the Hebrew Bible compared with the quadripartite structure of the Christian Old Testament, as well as the question of whether the latter was a Christian innovation or derived from an element of Judaism in the first century ce before Christians separated from Judaism. The recent questions about the significance of the order of the Christian Old Testament canon will also be examined below.

Early Jewish literature (ca. second century BCE to second century CE), composed and/or preserved in Greek, displays a new interest in reflexive practices. This article continues the study of interiority in this literature, initiated by Carol Newsom, David Lambert, and Lawrence Wills. The focus here is on the pervasiveness of this concern in narratives, as case studies (Susanna, Greek Esther, Josephus’s biblical retelling, and the Life of Adam and Eve) illustrate. Each narrative presents a common scenario: an accusation, false or not, is leveled against the protagonists, who, as a result, think or feel about themselves. All narratives are connected with the Hebrew Bible, where such a concern for the self is absent or marginal. Far from involving simple additions, this new attention reshapes narratives and their plotlines. The article concludes with some methodological reflections on how to trace the history of the self in this cultural and literary environment.

InThe Colonization of Land in Matthew's Gospel, Maziel Barreto Dani proposes that land is constructed as a colonized and subjugated entitl. Traditional scholarship claims that the Gospel of Matthew is detached from spatial-territorial discussions and that geographical land concerns are displaced with Christology. Dani, however, reinterprets multiple implicit and explicit references to land in the Gospel to show continuity, rather than discontinuity, with the Hebrew Bible’s concerns with material land promises. She does so by engaging the Gospel within its broader Roman, Hellenistic, and Jewish contexts where the theme of land possession is pervasive. Central to the Gospel and the imperial contexts from which it emerges are contestations over the land and proclamations to whom the land belongs. Dani argues that while Judea and neighboring lands are under the firm control of Roman imperial power during the first century CE, Matthew’s Gospel envisions Rome’s demise and the control of land being transferred to an alternative empire governed by the sovereign rule of God. Though God liberates the land from Rome’s oppressive grasp and restores land promises to the righteous poor at Jesus’ return, the land fails to escape colonial control. That is, the world, while relinquished from Roman hegemony, is reasserted under God’s power and domination. In arguing that Matthew’s Gospel employs an imperializing agenda involving land reclamation, the Gospel may be a source for validating and justifying the modern colonization of foreign and occupied land under the guise of God’s purposes.The Colonization of Land in Matthew's Gospelchallenges colonial ideologies which oppress not only peoples but the lands which they inhabit.

This chapter examines the arrangement of the books of the Writings and concludes that they have a purposeful shape. The level of canonical integration varies among this diverse collection, but there are signs that some books have been edited and/or arranged to highlight particular relationships between books. Within the Hebrew Bible, catchwords or phrases indicate a book’s purposeful placement, and there are signs of this in the case of Ruth and Esther. Among the vast array of historical information on the shape of the canon, Josephus and 4 Ezra are essential witnesses to the canon’s closure and shape in the first century ce. The internal and external evidence indicates that some of the books in the Writings were juxtaposed by design. Rather than an anthology of unrelated books, the collection grew up together in a complex symbiotic relationship.

The biblical texts from Qumran are the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, dating from the mid-third century BCE through the first century CE. Prior to the discovery of the Qumran texts, evidence for the early history of the biblical text consisted of three major versions – the Masoretic text (MT), the Septuagint (LXX), and the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) – each with an unbroken chain of transmission to the present day. This article assesses the major text-critical theories of the Hebrew Bible after Qumran. First, it surveys the textual situation at Qumran and the relationships among the Qumran texts and the major versions (MT, LXX, and SP), using, as a perspicuous example, the texts of Exodus. Then, the article addresses the adequacy of the text-critical theories, testing their strengths and weaknesses against this evidence. The major protagonists in the theoretical discussion are Frank M. Cross, Shemaryahu Talmon, Emanuel Tov, and Eugene Ulrich.

In two recent studies, one by William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book, the other by David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, these scholars present their answers to the age old question of how the Hebrew Bible came into being as a special collection of edited and canonized books. Both scholars reject the older formula of a three stage process of Law (400 BCE), Prophets (ca. 200 BCE), and Writings (First Century CE). Schniedewind, on the one hand, proposes an editorial process of collection and arrangement of traditional material within the preexilic royal court and among the royal scribes in captivity in Babylon that gave rise to an authoritative corpus, which was then augmented with some later works in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Carr, on the other hand, sees the collection and selection of biblical books within an educational process of enculturation that was continuous over an extended period from simple oral tradition in early Israel to the final stages of curricular consolidation, i.e., the canon, in which the priests play a major role. This study will examine a set of issues (e.g. orality and literacy; dating and composition of texts; editing and transmission of texts in antiquity; the role of texts in education) that are covered by these studies, and will offer some alternative suggestions for consideration.

Syriac literature exhibits interest in narratives associated with the Maccabees by the fourth century. Seventh-century manuscripts preserve two different Syriac translations of 1 Maccabees. The translation of this book into Syriac is not part of the Peshitta Old Testament translated from the Hebrew Bible in the second century CE. Its dating and the possible context for its production have not yet been the topic of scholarly investigation. This article examines quotations of and allusions to 1 Maccabees in Aphrahat, Ephrem, and the Martyrdom of Simeon bar Ṣabbāʿē. The last of these texts, likely produced in the early fifth century, offers the earliest evidence for a Syriac translation of 1 Maccabees. The production of a Syriac translation of 1 Maccabees in the fourth or perhaps early fifth century reflects efforts of Christian communities around this time to appropriate the Maccabean narrative for their own interests.