Sopher Mahir: Northwest Semitic Studies Presented to Stanislav Segert.

• Author: Rendsburg, Gary A.

Stanislav Segert has put all Semitists in his debt with his outstanding grammars of three languages of the Northwest Semitic group: Aramaic, Phoenician, and Ugaritic. To repay a portion of that debt, an international group of Segert's students and colleagues has honored him by collecting twenty-one of their essays in this excellent Festschrift.

Edward Cook begins this volume with a beautifully written appreciation of the honoree's life and work. Professor Segert truly deserves the appellation, sopher mahir, conferred on him by the editor.

In "A propos de Milkou, Milkart et Milk' ashtart," Pierre Bordreuil nicely brings together the many references to mlk in Ugaritic and Phoenician texts. The issues at hand are the understanding of mlk in conjunction with ttrt/ strt, and the relationship of these forms to the Tyrian divine name mlqrt.

Giorgio Buccellati's "Cybernetica Mesopotamica" describes the promising U.C.L.A. computer project for the processing of large amounts of data from cuneiform (Akkadian and Eblaite) texts.

In " EDAYIN/TOTE-Anatomy of a Semitism in Jewish Greek," Randall Buth discusses the use of edayin, 'then', as a narrative connector in Imperial-Biblical and Qumran Aramaic texts. Buth further notes that Greek tote operates in this manner in Matthew, but not in Mark and Luke (the latter following standard Greek practice). "The results from looking at tote are that any major Semitic sources for Mark and Luke should be Hebrew ... and that Matthew is responsible for adding the 'Aramaic' narrative style to his gospel" (p. 47).

Henri Cazelles, "Sur mdl a Ugarit, en Is 40,15 et Hab 3,4," surveys the many attempts to elucidate mdl in Ugaritic and to find cognates thereto in Hebrew texts.

The editor of the Festschrift presents a very detailed analysis of "The Orthography of Final Unstressed Long Vowels in Old and Imperial Aramaic." Cook argues very persuasively, contra F. M. Cross and D. N. Freedman, and in agreement with E. Y. Kutscher, that "all the available evidence suggests that final unstressed long vowels in Old and Imperial Aramaic could be, and often window to their grammatical contents. His conclusion is that the Samaria papyri are written in an Official Aramaic virtually identical" (p. 170) with that of the Elephantine papyri.

In "Proto-Semitic: Is the Concept No Longer Valid?," W. S. Lasor gives a useful review of the issues involved and an even more useful presentation of approximately two hundred words (though not...