Gary A. Rendsburg

King and kin : political allegory in the Hebrew Bible

Preface Acknowledgments A Note on Transliteration of Hebrew Words Preliminaries: the Question of Biblical Allegory I. The Garden Story Forward and Backward: The Non-Narrative Dimension of Gen. 2-3 II. Is There a Story of Abraham? III. David without Diagrams: Beyond Structure in the Davidic History From House to House Going Indoors YHWHOs Anointed Amnon and Tamar Nabal and Abigail Absalom The Imperium The Sons of Zeruiah oThis Way and ThatO oGood and EvilO The Garden Epilogue: The Nature of an Allegorical Relation Abbreviations Notes Index

Some False Leads in the Identification of Late Biblical Hebrew Texts: The Cases of Genesis 24 and 1 Samuel 2:27-36

ground.2 The identification of late biblical texts is often quite obvious. Books such as Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, Esther, Daniel, Qohelet, Haggai, Zechariah, and some others clearly date from the Persian period (or, in the case of Daniel, from the Hellenistic period). Occasionally the evidence is less obvious, but given the strong foundation of the SBH-LBH dichotomy, scholars have sought to expand the size of the late biblical corpus by identifying selected texts elsewhere in the Bible as exilic or postexilic compositions. This paper will have a look at two such attempts, with the hope of demonstrating that the learned authors who have made these specific proposals have been misled by some false leads.

Literary Devices in the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor

This article presents a detailed study of a variety of literary devices in the Egyptian story of the Shipwrecked Sailor. Special attention is paid to the role of repetition and to the presence of wordplay, particularly alliteration. Other devices are discussed also, such as the use of an inclusio to mark the completed cycle of the narrative, the employment of altered syntax to mark the end of a list of items, and the use of confused syntax to highlight the confusion of the moment at the point of the shipwreck.

Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts@@@Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period

Semitic words and names appear in unprecedented numbers in texts of the New Kingdom, the period when the Egyptian empire extended into Syria-Palestine. In this book, James Hoch provides a comprehensive account of these words - their likely origins, their contexts, and their implications for the study of Egyptian and Semitic linguistics and Late-Bronze- and Iron-Age culture in the eastern Mediterranean. Unlike previous word catalogs, this work consists of concise word studies and contains a wealth of linguistic, lexical, and cultural information. Hoch considers some five hundred Semitic words found in Egyptian texts from about 1500 to 650 B.C.E. Building on previous scholarship, he proposes new etymologies and translations and discusses phonological, morphological, and semantic factors that figure in the use of these words. The Egyptian evidence is essential to an understanding of the phonology of Northwest Semitic, and Hoch presents a major reconstruction of the phonemic systems. Of equal importance is his account of the particular semantic use of Semitic vocabulary, in contexts sometimes quite different from those of the Hebrew scriptures and Ugaritic myths and legends. With its new critical assessment of many hotly debated issues of Semitic and Egyptian philology, this book will be consulted for its lexical and linguistic conclusions and will serve as the basis for future work in both fields.

Physiological and philological notes to Psalm 137

In the first part of this article the authors discuss the physiology behind Ps 137:5-6, arguing that the poet describes a cerebro-vascular accident, or stroke, localized in the left side of the brain. Such a pathology results typically in paralysis of the right side of the body and speech deficits such as aphasia or apraxia. The psalmist utilized the metaphor of the stroke victim to evoke the emotional ties of exilic Israel to its capital city. In the second part of the article, various philological points are addressed

The Ammonite Phoneme /T/

The presumed equation of bʿlyšʿ on a seventh century B. C. Ammonite seal with bʿlys in Jer 40:14 reopens the complex question of sibilants and interdentals in Canaanite dialects. This article proposes that Ammonite retained the phoneme /ṯ/, which was represented orthographically by š, but was articulated as [s] by Cisjordanian speakers who lacked this sound in their phonetic inventory. Two pieces of evidence bolster the conclusion that Ammonite retained /ṯ/. First, the adjacent dialect of Safaitic also possessed the phoneme /ṯ/. Second, the well-etablished contacts between Ammon and Arabia may have prevented the shift of /ṯ/ > /š/ attested in the other Canaanite dialects. This bʿlyšʿ ∼ bʿlys phenomenon is paralleled by the following interpretation of the shibboleth incident in Judg 12:6: the Gileadites also retained /ṯ/, spelled š, but it was realized as [s] by the Ephraimites.

Moses the Magician

Exodus 1–15 repeatedly shows familiarity with Egyptian traditions: the biblical motifs of the hidden divine name, turning an inanimate object into a reptile, the conversion of water to blood, a spell of 3 days of darkness, the death of the firstborn, the parting of waters, and death by drowning are all paralleled in Egyptian texts, and, for the most part, nowhere else.

In 1Qs 7.15

The interpretations of this problematic word have been numerous, as the following review of the literature will demonstrate. The first study of the Community Rule was that of W.H. Brownlee, who simply emended the text to read i1’Ø~, which in this context was understood as ’to muffle’.1 The difficulties with this interpretation are two-fold: grammatical and semantic. The form me*? is an impossibility, since the expected form would be mivb (infinitive construct of final yodh verbs ends in -6t). Brownlee, of course, sensed this, as he was compelled to note that his proposed reading was a piel infinitive absolute. Moreover, even if it could be demonstrated that the root me can mean ’muffle’, it is not clear what or who is being muffled here. Brownlee undoubtedly realized this as well, for he included a question mark in his translation after ’muffle’.

Lewis Glinert. The Story of Hebrew. Library of Jewish Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. xii + 281 pp.

To write the three-thousand-year history of anything in 250 pages is no easy task. The challenge is even greater when the subject matter is a language. Yet Lewis Glinert achieves a readable and engaging history—or rather story—of the Hebrew language. That story, however, is much better told as the book progresses through the three-thousand-year history of the Hebrew language and, alongside it, the three-thousand-year history of the Jewish people. Which is to say, the narrative is much stronger and livelier when it treats the medieval and modern periods, no surprise given Glinert’s own interests and specialization. Throughout the book, Glinert weaves into the narrative a host of important information in a compact manner, with ample illustrations (both of texts, often in Glinert’s own translations, and of manuscripts and documents) serving to illuminate his points. Well-known figures such as Sa‘adiah Gaon, Jonah ibn Janah. , and Maimonides appear alongside more obscure figures such as Saʿid ibn Babshad, Joseph ibn Zabara, and Shabbatai Donnolo. In like fashion, most readers will learn here for the first time of the existence of Melekh ’Artus, a Hebrew Arthurian romance from 1279, “with the Holy Grail judiciously changed to a tamh.uy” (98). Glinert’s fluid prose and his ability to capture the essence of the Hebrew style of a particular writer create a very readable book. Authors ranging from Judah Halevi, Maimonides, and Judah al-H. arizi to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, H. ayim Nah.man Bialik, and Saul Tchernichovksy come alive in Glinert’s apt characterizations: for example, al-H. arizi’s “playful allusions to biblical imagery” (93), Bialik’s “poems of wrath” (192), Tchernichovksy’s “poems of Hellenic and Canaanite beauty” (192). Two fine chapters are devoted to Christian Hebraists, from Jerome through the Reformation, and indeed through the American colonial period. Among the gems to be mined in this book is Glinert’s treatment of the thirteenth-century Ramsey Dictionary (England), whose “verb section lists 1,392 Hebrew verbs, many with several subentries, and all listed (for the most part correctly) in the imperative form—a feat of organization and grammatical analysis by itself since in the Bible only one in ten of these verbs occurs in the imperative” (135). To allow the reader a glimpse of the Ramsey Dictionary, one folio of the manuscript is reproduced on the facing page (134). Book Reviews

Notes on 2 Kings 9:36-37

This article address several issues relevant to 2 Kgs 9:36-37. The most crucial of these is that the first word in v. 37, Ketiv והית / Qeri והיתה, should stand, contra the recent proposal by Jerome Walsh to read the noun ‘ruin, destruction’ here.