Search Results

This chapter recapitulates the main findings of the book. It is emphasized that interpreting Arabic language history requires many more detailed, case studies, models of which are presented in the preceding chapters. It is suggested that taken as a whole, contemporary Arabic, the dialects, are historically conservative in the sense that they exhibit relatively little change from a reconstructed pre-diasporic Arabic. This implicates a major re-thinking not only of Arabic language history, but also of Semitic in general, which has conventionally assumed the Old Arabic, Neo-Arabic dichotomy. It is further noted that besides a linguistic history, a sociolinguistic history of Arabic is needed to describe and explain the emergence of Classical Arabic.

This is the first of five chapters on the text of the Old Testament. It focuses on textual criticism of the ancient versions of the Old Testament, pointing out that no other ancient or modern text seems to be witnessed by so many diverse sources in a variety of languages, and has a transmission history so difficult to elucidate as the text of the Hebrew Bible. The essay offers a necessarily restricted survey of the early transmission history of the biblical text in manuscript form up to the crystallization of an incipient unified Hebrew text and the appearance of translations of the Hebrew original into other Semitic and non‐Semitic languages between c.200 bce and 300 ce; invariably, later secondary translations are not considered. Attention focuses on the early stages of the written transmission of the consonantal text with emphasis on a concise review of the information on its history, which can be obtained from two quite dissimilar groups of manuscript remains in respect to chronology and socio‐religious provenance: (a) the assemblage of biblical scrolls and scroll fragments (the Dead Sea Scrolls) brought to light since 1947 that the dissident ‘Community of the Renewed Covenant’ had deposited in caves near a site known by the modern Arabic name of Qumran; and (b) fragments found since the 1950s at other sites in the Judaean Desert—Masada, Wadi Murabba’at, Naḥal Ṣe‚elim (Wadi Seiyāl) , and Naḥal Ḥever, which represent the textual tradition of normative Judaism.

Chapter One introduces master potter Anton Lang, the most famous player of Christ and an exemplary Catholic whose lifestyle helped to promote the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) and whose success as a hotelier contributed to Oberammergau’s growth as a tourism center. In Lang’s Alpine village, families survived as wood carvers marketing Catholic devotionalia to an international clientele. Locals joined pilgrimages and Corpus Christi processions, a statement of Catholic loyalism, developed charities, and venerated “charity” saints. Oberammergau’s Passion Play drew a growing audience, including English speakers, to stay with ethnically intriguing villagers and, later, in hotels and upgraded homes. The play’s text highlighted antagonism between “Jews” and “Christians” in the Crucifixion story, but elite visitors validated its anti-Semitic message. The community’s subsequent evolution as a tourism center created diverse social and political groups, while village insiders acquired an exclusive mentality as Passion players, creating a deep social rift with newcomers in Oberammergau.

Together with material archaeology and the literary tradition of the Hebrew Bible, epigraphy is one of the main sources for the history of ancient Israel in the ninth century BCE. Although limited in number, West Semitic inscriptions throw some light on the history of this period. This chapter examines ninth-century West Semitic inscriptions and the historical information they contain regarding the history of ninth-century Israel. It starts with the Hebrew inscriptions, followed by inscriptions in the neighbouring southern Levant countries as well as Aramaic inscriptions from Upper Mesopotamia. The chapter deals first with inscriptions in ‘Canaanite’ dialects before analysing inscriptions written in Aramaic dialects. The Mesha and Tel Dan steles are the main West Semitic inscriptions that help us understand the history of Israel and Judah during the ninth century BCE.

This chapter discusses and presents a survey of the Old Testament, beginning with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and its ancient versions. It examines the rise of traditional biblical criticism and considers a study of the Hebrew language and its cognate Semitic languages. Finally, a survey of various topics and their historical perspectives is provided, along with some recent developments. The main focus of the chapter is to describe the dominant position of the mid-twentieth century.

This chapter examines in detail one of the key features which has been assumed to differentiate a putative Old Arabic from Neo-Arabic, the presence vs. absence of a three-valued case system, nominative, accusative genitive. The status of case is first examined in the context of Afro-Asiatic, where a system comparable to Arabic does not exist in sister branches of the phylum, then in the Semitic sub-family, where it is suggested that only Akkadian had a comparable, robust system. Case in Classical Arabic is argued to be innovative relative to proto-Semitic. The crucial arguments are that case is not found in the contemporary dialects, and more importantly, no traces of former case markers are found, inviting the conclusion that a caseless variety is the only ancestor of the dialects. Furthermore, in the early grammar of Sibawaih, the case suffixes are represented as having a great deal of free variation, indicating a system still in the making.

This chapter examines the dating of the aphrodisias stele inscriptions and the Semitic name-use by Jews in Roman Asia Minor. It investigates the progressive Hebraization of the Jewish onomasticon in western Anatolia between the second and sixth centuries AD and suggests that the Hebraizing trend became increasingly strong in the second half of this period. The chapter asserts that onomastic change during this period reflects changes in society as a whole.

This chapter examines the extraordinary difficulties encountered by the project to incorporate Jewish out-groups into Western civil societies. The discussion covers Jews and the dilemmas of assimilative incorporation; anti-Semitic arguments for Jewish incorporation; initial Jewish arguments for self-change; religious and secular modes of Jewish adaptation to the dilemmas of assimilation; new forms of symbolic reflection and social response in the fin de siècle; and the crisis of anti-Semitic assimilation in the interwar period.

Any archaeological study of slavery in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia) must take two factors into account: first, the paucity of archaeological evidence for this system, which is historically attested as being of immense economic importance in the Aksumite and post-Aksumite period; and second, that the ‘social memory’of slavery within the modern Ethiopian psyche has fuelled an ethnohistorical — potentially racist — dichotomy between the ‘Semitic’ highlands and the ‘Cushitic’ lowlands. This dichotomy also broadly mirrors a religious Christian/Muslim separation. This chapter argues that although apparently archaeologically invisible, the long history of slavery within this region of Africa has left a profound and legible cultural imprint upon its peoples and landscapes.

A re-evaluation of the opposition commonly assumed to obtain between the teaching and respective legacies of Macarius and Evagrius of Pontus – an opposition often put in terms of the contrast between Semitic and Hellenic Christianity, between intellective and affective mysticisms, between ‘head’ and ‘heart’. Both authors are shown to be ill served by such simplistic contrasts, both far broader in scope and vision than these would imply. The two are, however, legitimately to be distinguished in terms of emphasis and balance – Macarius emerging as the more subtle and holistic of the two.

The introduction to this chapter highlights the high culture of the priestly editors of Leviticus and Numbers and the fact that they were writing for each other in a once fashionable style that used structural devices such as verbal and thematic parallelism and ambiguity, but was fast becoming esoteric, obscure, and archaic; in other words, there was a vast gulf between the editor‐priests and their congregations. The author's interpretation of Leviticus and Numbers has been attacked as improbable on the grounds that if it was correct it would have been anticipated before: structural clues would have been noticed. The argument advanced here is that the two books have not before been searched for clues to their structure – such a search was not the approach of the early rabbis, nor was it possible in the period after the priestly editors had gone by the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, for the Levites who had succeeded to their role were less learned. The various sections of the chapter first look at the characteristics of the Levite interpretation of the Pentateuch, Bishop Lowth's eighteenth‐century discovery of biblical parallelism, parallelism as a typical convention of Semitic literature, and Mishnaic parallelism. The remaining sections present a detailed analysis of the structure of the Book of Leviticus: the prominent role of impurity in relation to the protection of the tabernacle from contamination but the concomitant inclusion of the poor and the stranger; the altar as focus of religion in the form, represented in Leviticus by the use of the desert tabernacle as an architectural model of the Book itself; and features of the style of Leviticus – the two violent events in Chs 10 and 24 (which divide the Book into three parts), the designation of the Book as one of three parts with three centres (Chs 8–10, 18–20 and 25–27), and its mid‐turn, which is centred at Ch. 19.

Judah Benzion Segal (1912–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, had a long career as a teacher of Semitic languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Segal’s principal interest was in Aramaic and Syriac, in addition to Hebrew and the other main Semitic tongues. Before his teaching career, he was employed in the Sudan Civil Service and, during World War II, his service was frequently behind the enemy lines in North Africa. He was educated at Magdalen College School, University of Oxford, and at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. One of Segal’s other abiding interests concerned the Jews of Cochin whose history he published in 1993. But it will probably be in the area of Aramaic studies that Segal will be best remembered in the academic world.

This chapter describes the tumultuous conclusion to the Johannes Reuchlin controversy, which unfolded in an atmosphere of heightened political instability. Leo X's verdict against Reuchlin, the papal condemnation of his pamphlet for expressing views “impermissibly favorable to Judaism,” was issued in conjunction with Rome's initial condemnation of Martin Luther and his Reformation movement. The chapter documents important connections between Reuchlinists and early Lutherans, including Reuchlin's influence on Luther's biblical exegesis, despite his personal repudiation of the Protestant revolt. In fact, the Reuchlin controversy was a key setting for the formation of Martin Luther's anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic ideology. Moreover, the papal verdict against Reuchlin prefigured the harsh paradigm of the Catholic-Protestant-Jewish dynamic that would soon emerge. As counter-reformation policies hardened, tolerance of Jewish life plummeted in the Papal States.