This volume inaugurates the publication of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls from the main collection discovered in Cave 4 at Qumran. It contains ten biblical manuscripts from Genesis to Deuteronomy and Job. Six are written in the ancient Palaeo-Hebrew script and four are in Greek. There are also five hitherto unknown compositions. The Hebrew texts antedate by a millennium what had previously been the earliest surviving biblical codices in the original language, and they document the pluriform nature (...) of the ancient biblical textual tradition before the text became standardized. The most extensive and significant manuscript, 4QpaleoExodm, exhibits the expanded textual tradition that formed the basis for the Samaritan Pentateuch and illumines the historical and theological relationship between the Jews and the Samaritans. Fragments of an unidentified Greek text mention Moses, Pharaoh, and Egypt, suggesting some development of the Exodus theme, and further witnessing to the rich religious literature to which Rabbinic Judaism and nascent Christianity were heirs. An index of all the biblical manuscripts from Qumran Cave 4 and their distribution in other Discoveries in the Judaean Desert volumes is provided, and there are also forty pages of plates from the manuscripts. (shrink)

Physics has been thought to truly represent reality since at least Galileo, and the foundations of physics are always established using philosophical ideas. In particular, the elegant naming of physical entities is usually very influential in the acceptance of physical theories. We here demonstrate (using current developments in thermodynamics as an example) that both the epistemology and the ontology of physics ultimately rest on poetic language. What we understand depends essentially on the language we use. We wish to establish our (...) knowledge securely, but strictly speaking this is impossible using only analytic language. Knowledge of the meanings of things must use a natural language designed to express meaning, that is, poetic language. Although the world is really there, and although we can indeed know it truly, this knowledge is never either complete or certain but ultimately must rest on intuition. Reading a recently discovered artefact with a palaeo-Hebrew inscription as from the first century, we demonstrate from it that this ontological understanding long predates the Hellenic period. Poetic language is primary, both logically and temporally. (shrink)

This article introduces the reader to the issue of verbal sequence in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible, a topic that was studied in depth as a doctoral dissertation. After noticing the peculiarities of the poetic discourse, it surveys the solutions offered to this crux interpretum to date, but concludes that these solutions are insufficient. Several limitations of such a study are assumed from the outset. We confine ourselves to the Psalter for various reasons given below. Terminologically, we resist (...) the temptation of modern terminology by making use of terms that are as neutral as possible. Methodologically, we employ Systemic Functional Grammar to describe the grammatical incidents wherein verbs are included. Lastly, the paper concludes with an overview of the potential contributions of such a study. (shrink)

In this article, the background of the phrase 'and live' in Hebrews 12:9 is investigated. Although most scholars are silent on the matter, the majority of those who venture to propose a possible background vaguely refer to Proverbs 6:23b. Only a handful of scholars propose other backgrounds. This article aims to fill this lacuna. The first part of the article gives an overview of the argument of Hebrews 12:9 in its context to determine a baseline for the interpretation of the (...) phrase 'and live'. This is followed by investigating eight possible backgrounds of the phrase and weighing arguments for and against each proposal. Next, the article integrates the findings and concludes that, of all the proposed backgrounds, Deuteronomy 8:1-5 fits the best. If this is correct, the writer uses the phrase 'and live' in Hebrews 12:9 to positively exhort his hearers to live life as their heavenly Father intended it, now up to eternity, by wholeheartedly obeying his revelation in his Son. (shrink)

Hebrew and Arabic in Asymmetric Contact in Israel Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic 1 have existed side by side for well over a century in extremely close contact, accompanied by social and ideological tension, often conflict, between two communities: PA speakers, who turned from a majority to a minority following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and IH speakers, the contemporary majority, representing the dominant culture. The Hebrew-speaking Jewish group is heterogeneous in terms of (...) lands of origin and includes a large community of Judeo-Arabic speakers. In this paper I discuss the ‘when,’ ‘where,’ how,' and especially ‘why’ of mutual borrowing2 between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel since the 1880s.I stress that the contact is asymmetric. The majority of Hebrew speakers today do not speak Arabic. They do, however, have access to borrowed lexicon in the domain of slang and vernacular speech that both enriches these registers and provides the speakers with a feeling of being ‘indigenous’ and ‘belonging’ to the social and cultural milieu of the larger environment. In contrast, most young adult PA-speakers are bilingual. For this minority, borrowing fulfills fundamental sociolinguistic and pragmatic needs. IH lexical items have permeated all areas of professional, educational, administrative, and social activities in everyday life discourse in all styles and registers of the spoken language and, to a lesser extent, written language. They fill lexical gaps and lacunae representing modern and western concepts that did not exist in PA. They also symbolize modernism, education, and social mobility. In other words, borrowing serves as a means of ‘stepping in’ for the Jewish majority and conversely as a means for ‘stepping out and up’ for the Arab minority. (shrink)

Qumran Hebrew: An Overview of Orthography, Phonology, and Morphology. By Eric D. Reymond. Resources for Biblical Study, vol. 76. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014. Pp. xvii + 309. $37.95.

This paper introduces a streamlined taxonomy for categorizing offensive language in Hebrew, addressing a gap in the literature that has, until now, largely focused on Indo-European languages. Our taxonomy divides offensive language into seven levels (six explicit and one implicit level). We based our work on the simplified offensive language (SOL) taxonomy introduced in (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk et al. 2021a) hoping that our adjustment of SOL to the Hebrew language will be capable of reflecting the unique linguistic and cultural nuances (...) of Hebrew. The study involves both linguistic and cultural analysis beyond Natural Language Processing (NLP). We employed manual linguistic analysis to understand the nuances of offensive language in Hebrew. An accompanying dataset, gathered on Twitter and manually curated by human annotators, is described in detail. This dataset was constructed to both validate the taxonomy and serve as a foundation for future research on offensive language detection and analysis in Hebrew. Preliminary analysis of the dataset reveals intriguing patterns and distributions, underscoring the complexity and specificity of offensive expressions in the Hebrew language. The aim of our work is to capture the complexity and specificity of offensive expressions in Hebrew beyond what automated NLP methods alone can provide. Our findings highlight the significance of considering linguistic and cultural variations when researching and correcting abusive language online. We believe that our streamlined taxonomy and associated dataset will be crucial in improving research in Hebrew language sociocultural studies, natural language processing, and offensive language detection. Our study also makes a substantial contribution to the study of low-resource languages and can be used as a model for future research on other languages. (shrink)

The Hebrew text On the Heavens and the World, ascribed to Ibn S, is an interesting and intriguing composition. It dates from the 13th century and was quite influential. It is not a translation of any text of Ibn S known to us, but is related to the Latin De celo et mundo, which appears in the 1508 Venice edition of translations of Ibn S. The Latin and Hebrew texts differ widely and the relation between them is far (...) from being clear. Both are in sixteen chapters, the titles of the chapters are the same, but the texts are only roughly similar. The Hebrew text often offers short, incomplete summaries of the Latin arguments. On the other hand it includes many passages which have no parallel in the Latin. There are two possible explanations of the perplexing relationship between the two texts: either that there was more than one version of the Latin text, or that the translator, Shlomo ben Moshe of Laguiri wrote a kind of paraphrase. The paper shows that the second explanation is correct and offers a preliminary study of the sources and the aims of the Hebrew text. (shrink)

This paper argues that efforts to understand historically remote patterns of thought are driven away from their original meaning if the investigation focuses on reconstruction of concepts , instead of cognitive ‘complexes’. My paper draws on research by Jan Assmann, Jean-Jacques Glassner, Keimpe Algra, Alex Purves, Nicholas Wyatt, and others on the cultures of Ancient Greece, Israel, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Etruria through comparative analyses of the semantic fields of spatial and temporal terms, and how these terms are shaped by their (...) relation to the sphere of the sacred. It shows that there are three super-ordinate timeframes - the cyclical, the linear and the static - each of which is composed of lower-order cycles (days, lunar months, and seasons). These timeframes reflect their cultures’ ideas about the nature, scope and power of the gods, and structure the common point-of-view about the present, the past and eternity. There are also super-ordinate spatial frames which reflect their cultures’ ideas about the heavens and which structure both the sacred precinct and the profane field of action and exchange. Close analysis of texts that use words such as eternity, forever, past, present, and future, for example, do not reveal that there is anything like a general abstract concept of time in virtue of which some thing or event can be said to be in time or to have its own time. Archaic patterns of thought do not differ from our “ modern ” patterns in having different concepts, but in not having anything like concepts at all. (shrink)

This paper argues that efforts to understand historically remote patterns of thought are driven away from their original meaning if the investigation focuses on reconstruction of concepts. It is simply not appropriate to be looking for an archaic concept of soul, name or dream, for example, when considering the earliest documents which attest to their writers’ beliefs about certain types of phenomena. Instead, we propose to employ the notion of cognitive complex in order to investigate some important philosophical themes in (...) Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Iranian, and Ancient Near Eastern documents. Our principal theoretical claim is that archaic thought does not work with concepts but with complexes whose salient features are an over-abundance of properties, an over-production of connections, and weakness in abstraction. The basic level of complex formation may be the most inclusive level at which it is possible to form a mental image. Specific studies are focused on ancient texts which exhibit archaic patterns of thought. In Egyptian texts, “manifestation” seems to convey something which all categories of beings are capable of becoming, being and having, assuming and leaving; the “name” was considered to be an essential component of the individual’s survival; symbolic representations, such as images and words, are causally connected to the ‘objects’ the image or word signifies. In ANE records the human etemmu was plainly the corpse or skeleton of the dead person; on the other hand it was also the shadowy, volatile image of what he was during life. In ANE records the baffling idea of the divine me referred to an entire cultural area, an acquisition of civilized life; but at the same time it is also the result of an invention, a divine decision. The complexes involved in these archaic ideas about soul, name and dream are ideas fused with their ‘objects’; they have unstable traits and prototypical instances; and are thought at the most abstract level which have concrete images. (shrink)

This article's polemical thrust begins with Georges Bataille's 1956 critique of Tristes Tropiques, where Lévi-Strauss omits the Palaeolithic while extolling the Neolithic advent of agriculture and sedentism. Whereas Lévi-Strauss describes his own thinking as Neolithic, he characterizes it in ways that resemble the behaviour of hunter-gatherers and nomads. I trace this contradiction to current scholarship willing to challenge the long-standing narrative bias that either ignores the Palaeolithic and/or derides it in favour of the Neolithic, now subject to refutations of its (...) alleged advantages. Further theoretical backbone is provided by Ibn Khaldun and Bataille on the centrality of luxury. Thus, Palaeolithic cave art's social dimension as the expression of a privileged few is contrasted with the view of scholars who see it as the product of an egalitarian society indifferent to material gain. Bataille remains a key reference due to his exceptional commitment to prehistory, a relatively underexploited facet of his work. (shrink)

What makes Jewish thought Jewish? This book proceeds from a view of the Hebrew language as the holy tongue; such a view of Hebrew is, indeed, a distinctively Jewish view as determined by the Jewish religious tradition. Because language shapes thought and Hebrew is the foundational language of Jewish texts, this book explores the idea that Jewish thought is distinguished by concepts and categories rooted in Hebrew. Drawing on more than 300 Hebrew roots, the author (...) shows that Jewish thought employs Hebrew concepts and categories that are altogether distinct from those that characterize the Western speculative tradition. Among the key categories that shape Jewish thought are holiness, divinity, humanity, prayer, responsibility, exile, dwelling, gratitude, and language itself. While the Hebrew language is central to the investigation, the reader need not have a knowledge of Hebrew in order to follow it. Essential reading for students and scholars of Judaism, this book will also be of value to anyone interested in the categories of thinking that form humanity's ultimate concerns. (shrink)

When understood as a potential resolution for the epistemological impasse between psychology and religion, Hebrew wisdom presents a model for dialogue. Noting that wisdom exhibits a special interest in human dispositions and behavior, the authors compare Viktor Frankl's logotherapy and Adlerian psychology with Proverbs and uncover a biblical, empirical approach to psychology which indirectly incorporates the religious dimension.

The present article deals with the translations of Hebrew and non Hebrew but presented as Hebrew anthroponyms and oikonyms in the work of Konstantin Konstenechki “Treatise of Letters” dating back to the first decade of the 15th century. Up to this moment excluding Jagić the researchers have not pay significant attention to this part of work and according to common opinion Konstantin did not know Hebrew language. However the careful language and textological analysis indicates that a (...) big part of the translations of names and words loaned from the Old and New Testaments are identical or stay close to the etymologies including in the modern dictionaries and other are result of phonetic comparison to Aramaic. There are also translations influenced by Midrashes and the works of Philo of Alexandria. (shrink)

Ancient Hebrew Periodization and the Language of the Book of Jeremiah: The Case for a Sixth-Century Date of Composition. By Aaron D. Hornkohl. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, vol. 74. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. viii + 517. $210.

In this article, the background of the phrase ‘and live’ in Hebrews 12:9 is investigated. Although most scholars are silent on the matter, the majority of those who venture to propose a possible background vaguely refer to Proverbs 6:23b. Only a handful of scholars propose other backgrounds. This article aims to fill this lacuna. The first part of the article gives an overview of the argument of Hebrews 12:9 in its context to determine a baseline for the interpretation of the (...) phrase ‘and live’. This is followed by investigating eight possible backgrounds of the phrase and weighing arguments for and against each proposal. Next, the article integrates the findings and concludes that, of all the proposed backgrounds, Deuteronomy 8:1–5 fits the best. If this is correct, the writer uses the phrase ‘and live’ in Hebrews 12:9 to positively exhort his hearers to live life as their heavenly Father intended it, now up to eternity, by wholeheartedly obeying his revelation in his Son. (shrink)

The Disputation or Cathechesis of Tortosa with its sixty-nine sessions (February 7, 1413-November 12, 1413) was the longest of the Jewish Christian encounters in the Middle Age. Stirred by the Avignonesian Pope Benedict XIII, Geronimo de Sancta Fide, olim Yehoshua ha-Lorki, summoned a group of Catalan and Aragonese rabbis to inform them that the Messiah was already came. Not only the Papal notaries recorded the excruciating debates, but also two Hebrew sources: the anonymous and fragmentary letter published by Halberstam (...) in 1868 and the chapter 40 of the Shebet Yehuda. They encompass the first nine sessions carried out orally, before the Pope requested for written texts to be debated lately. Since these sources disagree on many details, this paper aims at examining them anew. That examination has shown that the anonymous account is more accurate than the fictional report of the Shebet Yehuda as far as the internal chronology of the sessions, the speeches of the Jewish delegates and their identities are concerned. The internal evidence leads us to subscribe with Riera i Sans in ascribing its authorship to Bonastruc Desmestre from Girona, who was at Tortosa on request of the Pope. He probably knew other Jewish chronicle and added some new materials from the Vikkuach Ramban, Salomon Ibn Verga, the author of Shebet Yehuda, built upon this chronicle and created a fictional account around Vidal Benveniste or the ‘ideal’ portrait of the Pope and added some materials from the Latin Protocols or from unknown Jewish sources. (shrink)

This Article discusses the first steps of Israeli copyright law, dating it back to Ottoman times, which is earlier than thus far discussed in the literature. The account provides an early case of legal globalization through colonialism. The imposition of copyright law in Palestine enables us to observe the difficulties of applying an uninvited legal transplant and to trace its dynamics. The discussion queries the fate of copyright law in Mandate Palestine from two perspectives. First, the Colonial-Imperial point of view: (...) I ask why the British government imposed copyright law in the newly administered territory only a month after the establishment of the civil administration in 1920 and then replaced it in 1924. The answers are to be found in the general imperial agenda, its Palestine agenda, as well as the nature of copyright and the personal background of those involved. Second, from the local point of view, I trace the first steps of copyright law within the Hebrew community and especially within the literary circle in the 1920s. The local needs of the literary field concerned the author-publisher relationship, attribution, the integrity of the work and international transactions. However, the answers to these problems were not found in the law but rather in private ordering, namely contracts and social norms. (shrink)

The Septuagint (LXX) generally approached the antiphrastic, euphemistic use of ברך [bless] with a literal translation of ברך with εὐλογέω. This choice produced a Hebraism, as the Greek verb is not generally used antiphrastically. The translators may have expected the Greek audience to track with the figurative usage. Job contains four of the six uses of this euphemism, and LXX Job is evenly split between the use of εὐλογέω and the use of more creative renderings. These creative renderings in Job (...) 1:5 and 2:9 reflect the exegesis of the translator.Contribution: The contribution of this research article is its focus on the phenomenon of euphemism in Biblical Hebrew and the implications of non-literal renderings in the Septuagint for a theologically-significant Hebrew euphemism. The article fits within the scope of the journal as a contribution to this special collection on the Septuagint. (shrink)

The prevalence of sensationalized headlines and deceptive narratives in online content has prompted the need for effective clickbait detection methods. This study delves into the nuances of clickbait in Hebrew, scrutinizing diverse features such as linguistic and structural features, and exploring various types of clickbait in Hebrew, a language that has received relatively limited attention in this context. Utilizing a range of machine learning models, this research aims to identify linguistic features that are instrumental in accurately classifying (...) class='Hi'>Hebrew headlines as either clickbait or non-clickbait. The findings underscore the critical role of linguistic attributes in enhancing the performance of the classification model. Notably, the employment of a machine learning model resulted in an impressive accuracy of 0.87 in clickbait detection. Moving forward, our research plan encompasses dataset expansion through the best machine learning model assisted labelling, with the objective of optimizing deep learning models for even more robust outcomes. This study not only advances clickbait detection in the realm of Hebrew but also emphasizes the fundamental importance of linguistic features in the accurate classification of clickbait. (shrink)

When reading the Hebrew Bible, it is clear that the goddess Asherah is given a negative image. There are some fascinating probable misreadings, including one showing that she once might have had a more exalted role: in Deuteronomy 33:2 at the Lord’s right hand there was a ‘fiery law’, or was it ‘Asherah’? However, it appears that the Greek Septuagint preserves some additional references to Asherah which are surprisingly positive. In some of the places examined Asherah can confidently be (...) assumed to be underneath the Greek word for ‘grove’. Additionally, there are places where Asherah does not occur but the Greek translation gives us evidence that the word Asherah was there originally. Finally, two ‘goddess passages’ are shown to have significantly different emphases regarding Asherah when read in the Greek or other ancient translations.1. (shrink)

Our task will be to demonstrate that there are instructive parallels between Hebrew and Buddhist concepts of self. There are at least five main constituents (skandhas in Sanskrit) of the Hebrew self: (1) nepe as living being; (2) rah as indwelling spirit; (3) lb as heart-mind; (4) bāār as flesh; and (5) dām as blood. We will compare these with the five Buddhist skandhas: disposition (samskāra), consciousness (vijñāna), feeling (vedanā), perception (samjñā), and body (rpa). Generally, what we will (...) discover is that both Buddhists and Hebrews have a 'bundle' theory of the self; both see the body as an essential part of personal identity; both overcome the modernist distinction of the inner and the outer; and both avoid language about the will as a distinct faculty. In sum, both present us with a fully somatic and nondualistic view of being human. (shrink)

The Akan people of Ghana have concepts of ethnicity and social identity which are similar to those found in the Mediterranean world, which find expression in the issues addressed in the letter to the Hebrews. This similarity makes the reading of Hebrews in light of Akan ethnicity and social identity possible, giving one the expected meaning from the perspective of those concepts as within the original context of the audience. This article therefore discusses some theories on ethnicity and social identity (...) as well as the Akan people of Ghana and their concepts of ethnicity and social identity. It further explains the social context of the letter of Hebrews against which Hebrews is then read in light of Akan ethnicity and social identity. The focus of this reading is on how the ethnic identity of the readers presented in Hebrews enhances the social identity of the readers and provides the means by which the author’s appeal to his readers for their faithfulness to God becomes meaningful and urgent. (shrink)

Upon reading the Hebrew version of Lamentations in comparison to its Greek counterpart, one is immediately struck by the peculiarities, alternatives and variants when reference is made to a Hebrew deity. The Hebrew version alternates between יהוה and אדני, whilst the Greek version sticks to the term κύριος. The Hebrew version does, however, transition into an almost exclusive use of the term והיה from Lamentations 3:55 onwards. The immediate question that comes to mind is why certain (...) terms were used at certain intervals of the text to refer to a Hebrew deity. This study aims at coming to a deeper understanding of whether the idiosyncrasies in relation to the terms were brought about by the nature and character of lamenting, their underlying theologies or whether it is a matter of a different Vorlage. This study will therefore offer a close reading of the Hebrew text in relation to the terms used to reference a Hebrew deity, whilst the focus will fall on the textual variants when it comes to the Greek version of Lamentations.Contribution: This study contributes on three essential levels: (1) working towards a theology of the Septuagint in general and here specific the Greek version of Lamentations, (2) by focusing on the terms used to refer to a Hebrew deity in Lamentations, the study does contribute to a different perspective of reading the Lamentations text and (3) this study contributes towards a more nuanced understanding of a Hebrew deity in general and in the Septuagint in particular. (shrink)

Triggered Inversion (TI) in Hebrew has been previously analyzed as canonical A'-movement to the specificer position of a functional projection in the CP-layer (Doron & Shlonsky 1990, Shlonsky 1997). This article examines the semantic properties of TI constructions in Hebrew, specifically the cross-linguistic similarities between TI in Hebrew and pseudoclefts (PC) in English, as discussed in Heycock & Kroch (1999). A structure is proposed for Hebrew TI that parallels the structure given for equatives in Hebrew (...) by Rothstein (1995), in which the trigger is base-generated in the operator layer and the inverted surface word order is an artifact of subject movement to a position below that of the verb. Finally, TI is considered in the crosslinguistic typology of focus constructions outlined in Kiss (1998). (shrink)

Melanin, and other pigments have recently been shown to preserve over geologic time scales, and are found in several different organisms. This opens up the possibility of inferring colours and colour patterns ranging from invertebrates to feathered dinosaurs and mammals. An emerging discipline is palaeo colour: colour plays an important role in display and camouflage as well as in integumental strengthening and protection, which makes possible the hitherto difficult task of doing inferences about past ecologies, behaviours, and organismal appearance. (...) Several studies and techniques have been presented in the last couple of years that have described ways to characterize pigment patterns. Here, I will review the available methods and the likely applications to understand past ecologies. A golden age of colourized dinosaurs and other animals is now dawning upon us, which may elucidate the nature of ancient predator prey interactions and display structures.Also watch the Video Abstract. (shrink)

"Builds on the premise that language and thought are inevitably and inextricably bound up with each other. . . . A classic study of the differences between Greek and Hebrew thought."—John E. Rexrine, Colgate University.