Jewish Monotheism is built on a fundamental assumption: God has spoken to the Jews and commanded them to follow His law. But what exactly are - "God's words"? This monograph examines the notion of "word" in Ancient Judaism from the Bible to the Mishnah - from Scripture to this prominent Hebrew law handbook redacted at the beginning of 3rd century c.e. It explores the notion of human and divine "word" and its transformation in the narrative, legal, poetical, and theological pieces of Jewish literature. It pays particular attention to the semantic evolutions of all those substantives that designate a "word" or any other relevant element of speech that both humans and God use to communicate with each other. The monograph offers an analysis of the word field of the substantives of "word" from a double perspective - a linguistic and a cultural one. On the one hand it relies on Eugenio Coseriu's semantics and on the disseminated notion of "Hebrew functional languages." It starts from the presupposition that every term has its own meaning only due to its connection with other terms - called "lexical field." It also argues that Hebrew can be divided into several "functional languages" that have different social and communicative functions: a narrative, legal, poetical, and performative one. On the other hand, the monograph also takes into account the reception history of Scripture through its main ancient translations into Greek, Aramaic, and Syriac. In doing so, the monograph examines the word field of the substantives of "word" also from a cultural perspective and shows the evolution of this fundamental portion of Jewish literature.

This book provides an exhaustive analysis of the semantic domain of ‘gift’ in Ancient Hebrew. The investigation focuses on the single lexemes and provides an overall picture of the developments of the lexical field across the linguistic layers of Ancient Hebrew.

Blessings and curses represent complex social and theological phenomena, and challenge our linguistic and conceptual understandings of the society in which they are used. This volume gathers together the semantic information for the words used in ancient Hebrew (including inscriptions, Ben Sira and Qumran) for the field of 'blessing and cursing'. Since semantics must take into account the context in which the words are used, Part 1 surveys different approaches to the understanding of blessing and cursing in Israelite religion and society, and the anthropological and linguistic approaches taken in interpreting them. The relevance of these approaches to a semantic study is noted, and a summary of the second part of the volume is given. Part 2 is a detailed presentation of the data for each word, including discussion of the root, morphology, translations in the ancient versions, position within the semantic field and scholarly literature. The aim is to provide as full a treatment as possible for a semantic interpretation of the field. The volume has been produced as part of the international project, the Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database.

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 publication is a collection of studies devoted to various aspects of the semantics and lexicography of Ancient Hebrew. All contributions except the last two were originally delivered as papers to a symposium held in July 1994 at Leiden University. The symposium rounded off a three-year-long international network funded by the European Science Foundation under the leadership of Prof. Dr. J. Hoftijzer, from whose contribution to the present volume one may gain an insight into the conception and philosophy of the research project and its history so far. This volume will, in addition to some earlier publications which have appeared in the Zeitschrift fur Althebraistik, give the reader some idea of the general thinking which has assisted the authors in the formulation of their approach to the task lying before them. It ought to be emphasised, however, that all the studies appearing in this volume ought to be of interest to any Hebraist and Old Testament scholar, for they are hardly "in-house" publications, but address some important aspects of the Ancient Hebrew semantics and lexicography.