Peer-Reviewed Articles • Hebrew Language Resources 29

The single most important work on the grammar of the Amarna Letters is Rainey’s Canaanite in the Amarna Tablets.41 It is thorough, covering most topics related to untangling and elucidating the Amarna Letters. Nonetheless, it sprawls over four volumes, many topics are covered multiple times, and they are not always treated consistently. This work alone is a major contribution to the study of the Amarna Letters, but Rainey has also had an edition of the Amarna Letters published posthumously.42 Rainey’s edition of the Amarna Letters is a careful and valuable work. It corrects many of the errors that are contained in Knudtzon’s edition, yet Knudtzon’s remains preferable.43 Ebeling has provided a complete index to Knudtzon’s edition of all of the words and forms and where they can be found in the Amarna Letters. The glossary found in Rainey’s edition should be a convenient reference tool, except that it is at the back of a book that is already too large, and this negates the one purpose it would serve. Also, some of the texts in Rainey’s edition are simply re-transcriptions of Knudtzon, as the texts have been lost after his collations. Tropper and Vita have produced a much more recent and systematic treatment of the Canaanite Letters from Amarna; it is a good companion volume to Rainey’s treatment.44

Hebrew Language Resources

Hebrew Reference Grammars

Hebrew language study is in a better position currently than that of New Testament Greek from the perspective of the availability of recent reference works on grammar. One of the most thorough and up-to-date references for every aspect of the Hebrew language is Geoffrey Khan’s Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics.45 Each article in this work presents a different aspect of Hebrew grammar and linguistics with an up-to-date bibliography and linguistic sophistication, and it is edited by one of the foremost experts on Hebrew linguistics today. For reference grammars particularly, Muraoka translated and updated the footnotes of Joüon’s Hebrew grammar in the early 1990s. In 2009, Muraoka thoroughly revised the text and updated the bibliography to make it an excellent summary of the current state of research and a good guide to contemporary discussions of Hebrew grammar.46 Paragraph numbering largely remains the same across the different editions.

Joüon did not intend his grammar to be an exhaustive reference work, but rather a reference for intermediate students. Not every grammatical problem of the Hebrew Bible can be found in Joüon’s book, making it similar to the Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar, also designed for intermediate students.47 Both grammars are very good at what they do. Muraoka provides a better bibliography, which is a bit more thorough. Van der Merwe provides easily comprehensible overviews of grammatical topics, which are arranged logically, rather than pedagogically. Another outstanding feature of Van der Merwe’s work is the incorporation of modern linguistics. Joüon and Muraoka are more thorough than Van der Merwe, while Joüon and Muraoka are more philologically oriented. Joüon and Muraoka also cover morphology of Hebrew better than Van der Merwe.

41 Anson F. Rainey, Canaanite in the Amarna Tablets: A Linguistic Analysis of the Mixed Dialect Used by Scribes from Canaan (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996).

42 Anson F. Rainey and William M. Schniedewind, ed., The El-Amarna Correspondence: A New Edition of the Cuneiform Letters from the Site of El-Amarna Based on Collations of All Extant Tablets, Handbook of Oriental Studies = Handbuch Der Orientalistik, Section 1, Ancient Near East, volume 110 (Leiden: Boston: Brill, 2015).

43 J.A. Knudtzon, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln, (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1908).

44 Josef Tropper and Juan-Pablo Vita, Das Kanaano-Akkadische Der Amarnazeit (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2010).

45 Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

46 Paul Joüon and Takamitsu Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, 2 nd ed. (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Bi-blico, 2008).

47 Christo H. J. Van der Merwe, Jacobus A. Naudé, and Jan H. Kroeze, A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar, 2 nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2017).