Peer-Reviewed Articles • Hebrew Language Resources 27

Many of the different periods and corpora of Aramaic have their own grammars. One of the most important is the work of Muraoka and Porten, which focuses on the Aramaic papyri discovered in Egypt.23 For students of Biblical Aramaic, the most important of these locations is Elephantine. This Jewish settlement had a temple and exchanged important letters with the priests in Jerusalem—letters that offer a unique window into the Jewish diaspora of the Persian period. Muraoka and Porten have supplied a thorough grammar of the Elephantine texts.24

The most exhaustive dictionary for Aramaic in all of its different periods is the online resource from Hebrew Union College: The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon.25 A treasure trove of Aramaic material, this resource includes both texts and concordance searches for various corpora. Although the website is dated and the navigation less than straightforward, the information is reliable.

There are other dictionaries that are specifically oriented to Biblical Aramaic, but because the widely available BDB and HALOT cover this material well enough, it is not necessary to acquire a specifically Biblical Aramaic lexicon.26 Jastrow’s Dictionary is a unique resource for studying early Jewish Aramaic texts in that it is a dictionary of both the Aramaic and Hebrew portions of early Rabbinic material.27 Unlike BDB and HALOT, there is only one alphabetic ordering of the texts, so both Hebrew and Aramaic words will be found next to each other. This resource is valuable but should be supplemented by the more recent works of Sokoloff, who has made massive contributions to Aramaic lexicography.28 His dictionaries provide a comprehensive glossary for different corpora of Aramaic texts; they are invaluable resources for lexical studies in Aramaic.

Syriac

Though Syriac was a dialect of Aramaic, because of its cultural importance for Christians in the Middle East, and the abundant material written in Syriac, I treat it separately from Aramaic. Syriac is an important language for the study of the Hebrew Bible for two reasons: 1) it provides an important early edition of the text of the Hebrew Bible—as well as the New Testament; and 2) it is the best attested Northwest Semitic language that includes some vowel markers, which makes it a language helpful for restoring the vowels in non-Masoretic Hebrew and Ugaritic texts. A flurry of activity in the 19 th century pushed Syriac studies forward, though scholarship has not continued as rigorously in the 20 th and 21 st centuries. Thus, many of the standard reference works on Syriac were published over one hundred years ago.

Robinson’s Paradigms was originally published in 1915. This grammar has been revised by Coakley, and the 6 th edition is now available.29 With the 5 th and 6 th editions, this is still one of the standard pedagogical grammars for Syriac. One caution is worth considering: this work assumes some knowledge of Semitic languages. Muraoka has two pedagogical grammars that have slightly different foci.30 Both are also solid resources for Syriac grammar.

23 Takamitsu Muraoka and Bezelal Porten, A Grammar of Egyptian Aramaic, 2 nd rev. ed., Handbook of Oriental Studies 32 (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

24 For other periods and corpora of the Aramaic language see Gzella and the bibliographies in Weninger et al., The Semitic Languages; Woodard, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages; Hetzron, The Semitic Languages

25 http://cal1.cn.huc.edu/

26 For BDB and HALOT, see the section below on Hebrew Dictionaries.

27 Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York: The Judaica Press, 1996).

28 Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1990); Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2002); Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Judean Aramaic (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan Univer-sity Press, 2003). Sokoloff’s Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic is now in its third edition with a copyright date of 2017.

29 Theodore H. Robinson, Robinson’s Paradigms and Exercises in Syriac Grammar, ed. J.F. Coakley, 6 th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

30 Takamitsu Muraoka, Classical Syriac for Hebraists (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1987); Takamitsu Muraoka, Classi-cal Syriac: A Basic Grammar with a Chrestomathy (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1997).