Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Documentary Texts from Nahal Hever and Other Sites, With an Appendix Containing Alleged Qumran Texts, The Seiyal Collection II.

• Author: Muller-Kessler, Christa
• Position: Reviews of Books

Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Documentary Texts from Nahal Hever and Other Sites, With an Appendix Containing Alleged Qumran Texts (The Seiyal Collection II). By HANNAH M. COTTON and ADA YARDENI. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 27. Oxford: CLARENDON PRESS, 1997. Pp. xxvii + 381, maps, figs., plates. $175.

The book under review is the first complete text edition of the Judaean desert documents in Standard Literary Palestinian Aramaic, partially in Nabataean, Hebrew, and Greek from Nahal Hever and other provenances, including presumed fragments from Qumran cave 4. Most of the text material has been published before. It comes after the edition by E. Toy, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever: The Seiyal Collection I. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 8 (Oxford, 1990). According to information concerning the illegal finds, the larger part of the texts originates from Wadi Seiyal, but later official excavations speak more for Nahal Hever as their place of origin (p. xix). Some of the Greek finds had already been published by N. Lewis, The Documents from the Bar Kochba Period in the Cave of Letters, vol. I: Greek Papyri, Judean Desert Series, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1989). The second part of the latter texts is still missing.

The structure of the edition is clear. The monograph consists of an index of the copies (pp. xi-xiii); index of the plates with photographs (pp. xv-xviii); preface of the editor-in-chief (pp. xix-xxvi); sigla (p. xxvii); general introduction (pp. 1-6); introduction to the Aramaic and Hebrew documents, their translation, and instructive and comprehensive commentaries on the epigraphical problems, legal terminology, and language by A. Yardeni (pp. 9-129); introduction to the Greek documents and their transliterations by H. Cotton, with the assistance of A. Yardeni on the Nabataean dockets (pp. 135-279); appendix of the material presumably originating from Qumran by A. Yardeni (pp. 283-317); list of the joined fragments (pp. 319-22); extensive bibliography (pp. 323-44); indices of the months, personal and geographical names; index of Hebrew and Aramaic words in the form of a concordance that is very handy for the user; and finally a Greek word list (pp. 367-75).

Some remarks are in order concerning the language of the documents from Nahal Hever and Wadi [Murabba.sup.[subset]] at, which shares certain features with Nabataean (ltpeel-stem before sibilant roots without metathesis, [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT...