Estudios de intertextualidad semitica noroccidental: Hebreo y ugaritico.

• Author: Notarius, Tania

Estudios de intertextualidad semitica noroccidental: Hebreo y ugaritico. By GREGORIO DEL OLMO LETE. Barcino Monographica Orientalia, vol. 3. Barcelona: UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA, 2015. Pp. 523. [euro]40; [euro]18 (ebook).

The present volume is a collection of articles by the prominent Ugaritologist and biblical philologist Gregorio del Olmo Lete, published by the author mainly in Spanish (plus four articles in French and one in English) during the latest fifty years of his academic activity and dedicated to literary and cultural contextual studies of the Ugaritic-biblical historical continuum. It is a fortunate opportunity that these publications that had been spread over various journals, anthologies, and Festschrifts (the original places of publication are listed on pp. 463-65) have now been thematically arranged and made available under one cover, accompanied by four indexes: of topics, textual passages, lexical items, and onomastics. The volume is divided into four main parts and an appendix.

The first part, "Studies in Social-Religious Intertextuality," embraces seventeen studies of different aspects of the ancient Levantine cultural continuum. "The Problem of Translating from a Language without Speakers: The West-Semitic Perspective" concentrates on the notion of "cultural distance" between ancient texts and their modern readers and on the techniques of its overcoming: Each generation must travel this distance anew and through living the context and construe the implications in order to generate its own reading / translation of the texts. "Hebrew Studies in the University of Barcelona: Historical Synthesis" suggests a comprehensive analysis of Ancient Hebrew studies in Catalonia, starting from two main historical venues--the linguistic learnedness in the medieval Jewish community and the activity of the orders of Dominicans and Franciscans that resulted in the establishment of schools of oriental languages in the early fourteenth century--and following the development of the field up to the end of the twentieth century.

"Discovery of the Ancient Near East and Its Impact on Western Culture" outlines the main episodes of discovering the oriental, particularly Near Eastern, heritage by European scholarship from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. "From Tent to Palace / from Tribe to Dynasty: The Evolution of Political Authority in the Ancient Semitic World" investigates the dimorphic (semi-urban and semi-nomadic) structure...