Since the beginning of critical scholarship biblical texts have been dated using linguistic evidence. Until now there has been no introduction to and comprehensive overview of the field. Volume 2 of Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts contains an extensive overview of dates attributed to different books and corpora of the Hebrew Bible in modern scholarship, demonstrating the lack of consensus on the dating of biblical texts. A synthesis of the main arguments of the work is presented, drawing also on many points from volume 1, followed by 50 pages of case studies, a list of linguistic features attributed to LBH in earlier research, a bibliography of 70 pages and several indexes.

Unlike earlier investigations on the changes Biblical Hebrew underwent over the ages, this study does not attempt to draw a broad picture encompassing various kinds of linguistic phenomena. The work stresses the need for a well-founded statistical and form-oriented methodology for the description of historical linguistic change in the Hebrew Bible. With the aid of computer techniques the book concentrates on one major aspect of Biblical Hebrew, viz. the verbal tense forms. It examines the absolute and relative frequencies of these data in the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles in a comprehensive manner. In this way some of the established opinions concerning increase or decrease in the use of certain tense forms are confirmed, others contradicted, and new evidence is adduced. In addition to the statistical analyses, Verbs & Numbers contains a complete inventory of the parallel passages where Chronicles has another tense form than the Vorlage. This makes it a valuable source of information for the interpretation of the book of Chronicles.

Over the years the use of computers for research has become increasingly important in Biblical Studies. However, a combination of computational linguistics with diachronic text-critical and text-historical approaches has hardly ever taken place. Quite often, there is mutual misunderstanding between computational linguistics and more traditional approaches in the field of linguistics and textual analysis. For example, in computer-assisted research of modern text corpora it is common to treat the text as an unequivocal and unidimensional sequence of characters. In Biblical Studies, however, either text is considered an abstraction, the result of a scholarly reconstruction based on the extant textual witnesses. Here a fundamental difference in approach reveals itself. The present volume tries to overcome the misunderstanding between the various disciplines and to establish how a fruitful interaction of information technology, linguistics and textual criticism, can contribute to the analysis of ancient texts. It addresses questions concerning the confrontation between synchronic and diachronic approaches, the role of linguistic analysis in the interpretation of texts, and the interaction of linguistic theory and the analysis of linguistic data. The first section of this volume contains the papers presented at the CALAP seminar 2003. In the second section different aspects of the interdisciplinary analysis are applied to a selected passage from the Peshitta of Kings.

An international array of twenty-six scholars contributes twenty-one essays to honor Ziony Zevit (American Jewish University), one of the foremost biblical scholars of his generation. The breadth of the honoree is indicated by the breadth of coverage in these twenty-one articles, with seven each in the categories of history and archaeology, Bible, and Hebrew (and Aramaic) language.