In Hebrew Lexical Semantics and Daily Life in Ancient Israel, Kurtis Peters hitches the world of Biblical Studies to that of modern linguistic research. Often the insights of linguistics do not appear in the study of Biblical Hebrew, and if they do, the theory remains esoteric. Peters finds a way to maintain linguistic integrity and yet simplify cognitive linguistic methods to provide non-specialists an access point. By employing a cognitive approach one can coordinate the world of the biblical text with the world of its surroundings. The language of cooking affords such a possibility – Peters evaluates not only the words or lexemes related to cooking in the Hebrew Bible, but also the world of cooking as excavated by archaeology.

Food and feasting are key themes in the Hebrew Bible and the culture it represents. The contributors to this handbook draw on a multitude of disciplines to offer an overview of food in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel. Archaeological materials from biblical lands, along with the recent interest in ethnographic data, a new focus in anthropology, and emerging technologies provide valuable information about ancient foodways. The contributors examine not only the textual materials of the Hebrew Bible and related epigraphic works, but also engage in a wider archaeological, environmental, and historical understanding of ancient Israel as it pertains to food. Divided into five parts, this handbook examines and considers environmental and socio-economic issues such as climate and trade, the production of raw materials, and the technology of harvesting and food processing. The cultural role of food and meals in festivals, holidays, and biblical regulations is also discussed, as is the way food and drink are treated in biblical texts, in related epigraphic materials, and in iconography.

This book employs cognitive linguistics to determine the foundational elements of the ancient Israelites’ concept of teaching as reflected in the text of the Hebrew Bible and Ben Sira. It analyzes four prominent lexemes that comprise a lexical set referring to the act of teaching: ירה-H, למד-D, ידע-H, and יסר-D. The study concludes that, in its most basic form, the concept of teaching in ancient Israel was that a teacher creates the conditions in which learning can occur. The methodology employed in this project is built on a premise of cognitive studies, namely, that because teaching is a universal human activity, there is a universal concept of teaching: one person A recognizes that another person B lacks knowledge, belief, skills, and the like (or has incomplete or distorted knowledge, etc.), and person A attempts to bring about a changed state of knowledge, belief, or skill in person B. This universal concept provides the starting place for understanding the concept of teaching that Biblical Hebrew reflects, and it also forms the conceptual base against which the individual lexemes are profiled. The study incorporates a micro-level analysis and a macro-level analysis. At the micro-level, each lexeme is examined with respect to its linguistic forms (the linguistic analysis) and the contexts in which the lexeme occurs (the conceptual analysis). The linguistic analysis considers the clausal constructions of each instantiation and determines what transitivity, ditransitivity, or intransitivity contributes to the meaning. Collocations of the lexeme, including prepositional phrases, adverbial adjuncts, and parallel verbs, are evaluated for their contribution to meaning. The conceptual analysis of each lexeme identifies the meaning potential of each word, as well as what aspect of the meaning potential each instantiation activates. The study then determines the lexeme’s prototypical meaning, which is profiled on the base of the universal concept of teaching. This step of profiling represents an important adaptation of the cognitive linguistics tool of profiling to meet the special requirements of working with ancient texts in that it profiles prototype meanings, not instantiations. In the macro-analysis, the data of all four lexemes in the lexical set are synthesized. The relationships among the lexemes are assessed in order to identify the basic level lexeme and consider whether the lexemes form a folk taxonomy. Finally, the profiles of the four prototype meanings are collated and compared in order to describe the ancient Israelite concept of teaching. The study finds that the basic level item of the lexical set is למד-D based on frequency of use and distribution. In its prototypical definition, למד-D means to intentionally put another person in a state in which s/he can acquire a skill or expertise through experience and practice. In contrast to this sustained kind of teaching, the prototypical meaning of ירה-H is situational in nature: a person of authority or expertise gives specific, situational instruction to someone who lacks knowledge about what to do. The lexemes יסר-D and ידע-H represent the most restricted and the most expansive lexemes, respectively: the prototypical meaning of יסר-D is to attempt to bring about changed behavior in another person through verbal or physical means, often to the point of causing pain; the prototypical meaning of ידע-H is that a person of authority causes another person to be in a state of knowing something from the divine realm or related to experiences with the divine realm. The study determines that while the four lexemes of the Biblical Hebrew lexical set “to teach” have significant semantic overlap, they cannot be construed in a folk taxonomy because the words are not related in a hierarchical way.

In ‘He is a Glutton and a Drunkard’: Deviant Consumption in the Hebrew Bible Rebekah Welton uses interdisciplinary approaches to explore the social and ritual roles of food and alcohol in Late Bronze Age to Persian-period Syro-Palestine (1550 BCE–400 BCE). This contextual backdrop throws into relief episodes of consumption deemed to be excessive or deviant by biblical writers. Welton emphasises the social networks of the household in which food was entangled, arguing that household animals and ritual foodstuffs were social agents, challenging traditional understandings of sacrifice. For the first time, the accusation of being a ‘glutton and a drunkard’ (Deut 21:18-21) is convincingly re-interpreted in its alimentary and socio-ritual contexts.

Since 1995 five centres in Europe (Cambridge, Firenze, Leuven, Oxford, and Roma) have been engaged in a joint research project, Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database. The project aims at building an ongoing database which consists of a critical and exhaustive assessment of lexico-semantic studies on the vocabulary of Ancient Hebrew published since the end of the Second World War. The corpus includes not only Biblical Hebrew, but also epigraphic materials, Ben Sira, and Hebrew documents from the Judean Desert. Each centre has been working on lexemes belonging to a particular field. The present volume publishes results of this research on select lexemes covering the field of cosmos (/bri'ah/), cursing (/'-R-R/, /m'erah/, /N-Q-B/, /Q-B-B/, way /derekh/, /msillah/, /ma'gal/, /mish'ol/, royal appurtenance (/hadom/, /kisse/, /nezer/, /'atarah/, /shevet/). The editor of the volume is the chair of the Executive Committee of the project.

This handbook presents an overview of the main approaches from social and cultural anthropology to the Hebrew Bible. Since the late 19th century, biblical scholarship has addressed issues and themes related to biblical stories from a perspective which could now be considered socio-anthropological. It is however only since the 1960s that biblical scholars have started to produce readings and incorporate analytical models drawn directly from social anthropology to widen the interpretive scope of the social and historical data contained in the biblical sources. The handbook is arranged into two main thematic parts. Part 1 assesses the place of the Bible in social anthropology, examines the contribution of ethnoarchaeology to the recovery of the social world of Iron Age Palestine and offers insights from the anthropology of the Mediterranean for the interpretation of the biblical stories. Part 2 provides a series of case studies on anthropological themes arising in the Hebrew Bible. These include kinship and social organisation, death, cultural and collective memory, and ritualism. Contributors also examine how the biblical stories reveal dynamics of power and authority, gender, and honour and shame, and how socio-anthropological approaches can reveal these narratives and deepen our knowledge of the human societies and cultural context of the texts. Bringing together the expertise of scholars of the Hebrew Bible and Biblical Archaeology, this ethnographic introduction prompts new questions into our understanding of anthropology and the Bible.

In this volume, C. L. Crouch and Jeremy M. Hutton offer a data-driven approach to translation practice in the Iron Age. The authors build on and reinforce Crouch's conclusions in her former work about Deuteronomy and the Akkadian treaty tradition, employing Hutton's "Optimal Translation" theory to analyze the Akkadian-Aramaic bilingual inscription from Tell Fekheriyeh. The authors argue that the inscription exhibits an isomorphic style of translation and only the occasional use of dynamic replacement sets. They apply these findings to other proposed instances of Iron Age translation from Akkadian into dialects of Northwest Semitic, including the relationship between Deuteronomy and the Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon and the relationship between the treaty of Assur-nerari V with Mati?ilu and the Sefire treaties. The authors then argue that the lexical and syntactic changes in these cases diverge so significantly from the model established by Tell Fekheriyeh as to exclude the possibility that these treaties constitute translational relationships.