A Dictionary Of Christian Palestinian Aramaic

Christian Palestinian Aramaic is the name of the Aramaic dialect spoken and written by the Melkite community in Palestine during the first millennium CE. Nearly all of the texts that have survived in this dialect are translations of religious texts originally composed in Greek for the use of members of this community whose only language was Aramaic. The only complete dictionary of this dialect was published over a century ago by Fr. Schulthess in 1903. However, since then, many new texts have been published and many previously known ones have been restudied and republished more accurately by various scholars. The present work has taken into account all of the existing texts as well as the secondary literature in order to make this new dictionary an essential tool for Aramaic scholarship.

This book has been planned to be used together with the author's Dictionary of Christian Palestinian Aramaic. The texts which form the basis of this volume were originally published in a large number of scattered publications making both their citation in the dictionary and their use by the reader difficult. The purpose of the present work has been to gather all of these texts into one convenient volume and to republish them in the original Palestinian Aramaic script and format. Additionally, a number of Appendices dealing with this Aramaic dialect have been added to clarify other issues concerning the dictionary.

Since the Middle Ages, lexographies of Talmudic and other rabbinic literature have combined in one entry Babylonian, Palestinian, and Targumic words from various periods. Because morphologically identical words in even closely related dialects can frequently differ in both meaning and nuance, their consolidation into one dictionary entry is often misleading. Scholars now realize the need to treat each dialect separately, and in A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Michael Sokoloff provides a complete lexicon of the dialect spoken and written by Jews in Palestine during the Byzantine period, from the third century C.E. to the tenth century. Sokoloff draws on a wide range of sources, from inscriptions discovered in the remains of synagogues and on amulets, fragments of letters and other documents, poems, and marginal notations to local Targumim, the Palestinian Midrashim and Talmud, texts addressing religious law (halacha), and Palestinian marriage documents (ketubbot) from the Arabic period. Many of these sources were unavailable to previous lexographers, who based their dictionaries on corrupt nineteenth-century editions of the rabbinic literature. The discovery of new manuscripts in both European libraries and the Cairo Geniza over the course of the twentieth century has revolutionized the textual basis of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. Each entry in A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic is divided into six parts: lemma or root, part of speech, English gloss, etymology, semantic features, and bibliographic references. Sokoloff also includes an index of all cited passages. This major reference work, updated to reflect the publication of new texts over the last decade, will both provide students and scholars with a tool for an accurate understanding of the Aramaic dialect of Jewish Palestinian literature of the Byzantine period and help Aramaist and Semitic linguists to see the relationship between this dialect and others, especially the contemporary dialects of Palestine.

All surviving fragments of the Christian Palestinian Aramaic version of the early period (5th-8th centuries AD) and the middle period (9th-10th centuries AD) are collated, and the individual biblical books are arranged according to their original manuscript. The text is accompanied by a philological commentary and a glossary. --from publisher description.

In Christian Arabic Versions of Daniel, Miriam L. Hjälm provides an insight into the Arabic transmission of the biblical Book of Daniel with a focus on translation techniques used in the early manuscripts.

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