I had originally planned two articles on the character of Boaz and subsequently presented two separate papers. The first was on the figure of Boaz strictly within the biblical book of Ruth. The other was on how the Targumist had transformed the figure of Boaz in Targum Ruth. This progression […]
Aramaic
74 posts
UPDATE: CAL is back up now, including our favorite, Targum Ruth! (Thanks Ed!) CORRECTION: Sorry. I meant to specify Targum Ketuvim as not working yet. Ed Cook immediately wrote me to say that Targum is working for him. It is true that TgOnk and TgJon are working. PsJon does not appear […]
Short and to the point. Be sure to click through to get a bit more and some nice bibliography on the subject (and verb). Two recent articles from well-respected news agencies have included fallacious details about the relationship between Hebrew and Aramaic. The first described the Aramaic dialect spoken in […]
I am very (very) pleased to post my translation of Targum Ruth. It can be found here and the opening comments and first verse are below. This is a first draft and the English needs smoothing, but I thought I would do a bit of “crowd sourcing.” Feel free to […]
I make no bones about it, I am no linguist. I do not derive great joy (and usually, no joy at all) from hours spent trying to decipher and understand grammar. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when I have developed language skills and believe it is vital to […]
Yesterday, as simply a means of illustrating the announcement about the new book on Lamentations I quickly created two word clouds of the Book of Lamentations and the Targum of Lamentations. As with Ruth there are some interesting observations one can make from this simple graphic. For those not familiar, […]
A year ago, almost to the day, I shared with you all that a new book was forthcoming on the topic of Lamentations and its interpretation in Christianity and Judaism. Yesterday I received the proofs and Great Is Thy Faithfulness: Reading Lamentations as Sacred Scripture should be ready for purchase […]
This has always bothered me… So tell me, how would you translate הנה (biblical Hebrew) or הא (Aramaic) into “modern” English? Ignoring it, as some are wont to do, seems to be lying to hiding something from the reader and using “just then,” as the NRSV, seems to convey something […]
In the comments section of my review of Sente Danny Zacharias of Deinde expresses surprise that I was not using Mellel for my scholarly work. He did not realize that any other word processor on MacOS X supported unicode and right to left languages such as Hebrew. Not so! Nisus […]
This is an exciting project that our colleagues at Manchester and Durham have been working on. News from Alex Samely: Dear Colleagues, I have pleasure in announcing the availability of a new terminological framework for the analysis of ancient Jewish literature, the “Inventory of Structurally Important Literary Features in the […]