Ugaritic Vocabulary In Syllabic Transcription

In 1961 William L. Morgan published "The Hebrew Language in Its Northwest Semitic Background", in which he presented a state-of-the-art description of the linguistic milieu out of which Biblical Hebrew developed. Moran stressed the features found in earlier Northwest Semitic languages that are similar to Hebrew and he demonstrated how the study of those languages sheds light on Biblical Hebrew. Since Moran wrote, our knowledge of both the Hebrew of the biblical period and of Northwest Semitic has increased considerably. In the lights of new epigraphic finds and the significant advances in the fields of Biblical Hebrew and Northwest Semitic in the past four decades, the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem convened an international research group during the 2001-2002 academic year on the topic "Biblical Hebrew in Its Northwest Semitic setting: Typological and Historical Perspectives." The volume presents the fruits of the year-long collaboration and contains twenty articles based on lectures given during the year by members of the groups and invited guests. A wide array of subjects are discussed, all of which have implications for the study of Biblical Hebrew and Northwest Semitic.

While topics such as death, funerary cult, and the netherworld have received considerable scholarly attention in the context of the Ugaritic textual corpus, the related concept of life has been relatively neglected. Life and Mortality in Ugaritic takes as its premise that one cannot grasp the significance of mwt (“to die”) without first having wrestled with the concept of ḥyy (“to live”). In this book, Matthew McAffee takes a lexical approach to the study of life and death in the Ugaritic textual corpus. He identifies and analyzes the Ugaritic terms most commonly used to talk about life and mortality in order to construct a more representative framework of the ancient perspective on these topics, and he concludes by synthesizing the results of this lexical study into a broader literary discussion that considers, among other things, the implications for our understanding of the first-millennium Katumuwa stele from Zincirli. McAffee’s study complements previous scholarly work in this area, which has tended to rely on conceptual and theoretical treatment of mortality, and advances the discussion by providing a more focused lexical analysis of the Ugaritic terms in question. It will be of interest to Semitic scholars and those who study Ugaritic in particular, in addition to students of the culture of the ancient Levant.

Lexicography, together with grammatical studies and textual criticism, forms the basis of biblical exegesis. Recent decades have seen much progress in this field, yet increasing specialization also tends to have the paradoxical effect of turning exegesis into an independent discipline, while leaving lexicography to the experts. The present volume seeks to renew and intensify the exchange between the study of words and the study of texts. This is done in reference to both the Hebrew source text and the earliest Greek translation, the Septuagint. Questions addressed in the contributions to this volume are how linguistic meaning is effected, how it relates to words, and how words may be translated into another language, in Antiquity and today. Etymology, semantic fields, syntagmatic relations, word history, neologisms and other subthemes are discussed. The main current and prospective projects of biblical lexicology or lexicography are presented, thus giving an idea of the state of the art. Some of the papers also open up wider perspectives of interpretation.

In this book, Aren M. Wilson-Wright proposes a new model for studying gods in the Ancient Near East. He then illustrates the utility of this model by applying it to a detailed study of the goddess Athtart at three Late Bronze Age sites: Egypt, Emar, and Ugarit. -back of book

As any dictionary of a dead language the present aims to indicate the stage reached by the Ugaritic consonantal lexicography and to serve as a reference work. This edition includes the whole of the new discovered materials.