Das althebraische Verbalsystem aus aramaischer Sicht: Masoretischer Text, Targume und Peschitta.

• Author: Lipinski, Edward
• Position: Review

By STEFAN BOMBECK. Europaische Hochschulschriften, Series XXIII, no. 591. Frankfurt am Main: PETER LANG, 1997. Pp. 251. DM 51.95.

This is a slightly reworked dissertation originally supervised by A. Denz and presented in 1995 at the University of Munich. It deals with the Hebrew verbal system in Genesis through 2 Kings, realized from ancient Aramaic translations: the Targums and the Peshitta. A sketchy presentation of the Masoretic verbal system (pp. 19-22) is followed by a description of Aramaic verbal forms, of their use and function, first in Targum Onqelos and in Targum Jonathan to the Former Prophets (pp. 23-29), then in Targum Neofiti I and in Pseudo-Jonathan (pp. 29-52), and finally in Syriac (pp. 52-57). The main part of the book deals with the Aramaic translation of Hebrew verbal forms in verbal clauses, first in general (pp. 59-196), then in some specific clause types (pp. 196-224), finally in poetic passages (pp. 224-27). The concise summary (pp. 227-28) is followed by a short presentation of the historical development of the Hebrew verbal system (pp. 229-32), by a bibliography (pp. 233-34), and by an index of Hebrew and Aramaic quotations (pp. 235-51).

If rooted in a proper approach to the Semitic verbal system, this kind of study may lead to a better understanding of Hebrew "tenses" as perceived at the time of the various translations of the Bible into Aramaic, in the early centuries A.D. It cannot inform us, however, about the function of verbal forms in the first millennium B.C., when Hebrew was a spoken language. This should have been stressed clearly in the prologue. Moreover, the Targums underwent a series of revisions and the same must be said about the Peshitta. The value of such research depends thus greatly on the quality of the text analyzed and on a careful examination of possible variants. For the Targums, the author made use of the editions by A. Sperber, The Bible in Aramaic, I-II (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1959); by A. Diez Macho, Neophyti (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Inv. Cientif., 1968-79); and by E. G. Clarke et al., Targum Pseudo-Jonathan of the Pentateuch (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1984). For the Syriac version, he used the edition of the Peshitta Institute at Leiden, The Old Testament in Syriac (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972 ff.) (p. 16). Now, the Peshitta text of the Leiden edition is based, as a rule, on the Codex Ambrosianus B.21 Inferiore in Milan, dating from the seventh century. This is a representative of the...