E.Y. Kutscher emphasized that the goal of the scholarship on Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (= JBA) is to reconstruct the historical language of the Jews speaking Aramaic in Babylonia in the first millennium ce. Given this task, the philologist must consider all forms and constructions that appear in the textual evidence of this dialect in order to determine what reflects the original language and what results from textual corruptions during the transmission of the texts. This methodology became the scholarly consensus for the academic study of JBA. However, no one who follows Kutscher’s methodological tradition ever provided clear criteria for recognizing what should be considered original JBA. Therefore, this paper tries to piece together the methodological assumptions behind this quest to identify the original language. However, when considering the sociolinguistic model of diglossia, and the various types of developments that could take place in the transmission of the texts it becomes clear that those criteria are not decisive, and that the same phenomena can be explained in various ways. Consequently it is proposed that: 1) We may have to be satisfied with the fact that it is not always possible to determine which phenomenon is original. Often it is only possible to raise the various options regarding each and every form; 2) It is not advisable to determine generally which one of the manuscripts provides the most reliable textual evidence for all the linguistic phenomena (the so-called “best manuscript”), as this may change in each case. Consequently, it is suggested, instead, to discuss phenomena rather than sources, and focus on internal relations between forms and structures.

This paper concentrates on the etymology of the epistolary terms k‘t, k‘nt in Official Aramaic and proposes that they are related to the root k-‘-n, used both in official correspondence from Middle Assyrian and in the Amarna letters. In this discussion various dialectal features in the history of Aramaic are discussed, among them: rule ordering with regards to the assimilation of the consonant –n, and the insertion of an anaptyxis between clusters of two final consonants; the existence of two allomorphs in Aramaic for the feminine ending, -at and –t; and a consideration of the existence of some connection between the dialect of the Sefire inscription and the dialect of the Hermopolis letters.

This study uses typological surveys of predicative possessive constructions across languages and illustrates how a typological study may contribute to a historical discussion. More specifically it provides an account of such constructions in the history of Akkadian. The typological surveys reveal that various constructions in Akkadian not only connote possession accidently, but rather are tokens of predicative possessive constructions. Thus, this article provides a synchronic survey of different marginal predicative possessive constructions in Akkadian, of different dialects and from different periods, most of them unnoticed in the literature. Second, once these constructions are identified, assuming their existence in the history of a language may contribute to explaining other related phenomena, either as motivations for certain diachronic developments or as historical syntactic/semantic explanations for other phenomena. In the context of Akkadian, it will be first and foremost used to explain the origin of the Akkadian verb išûm, the equivalent of the English verb ‘to have’, as Akkadian is unique among the Semitic languages in having a finite verb for this function.

In this paper I discuss the passiveness of one pattern in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, the pattern which consists of the passive participle and the preposition ‘l ’ followed by a pronominal suffix. I will demonstrate that this pattern is indeed a passive construction. For this purpose I will deal with the definition of what a passive construction is in general, then apply this definition to the construction under review, and conclude my discussion by treating some of the possible objections that could be raised against this analysis. As will become clear, this pattern, like similar patterns in other languages, raises the crucial question whether it is possible to have a passive sentence without a clear active partner. This paper will endorse a positive answer to this question.

In the context of establishing the pronominal dual forms of proto-Semitic, philologists sought for vestiges of such forms in different non-related branches of the Semitic family of languages. This paper starts with an updated reconstruction of the Proto-Semitic’s dual pronouns based on all the information at our hands, and consequently examines the evidence proposed in the literature for vestiges of these forms in the biblical consonantal text, especially the most recent support made by Rendsburg. In a list of publications Rendsburg proposed to strengthen this hypothesis by using statistical considerations. This paper will reject his conclusions and will refute his arguments by demonstrating that merely counting examples can be very misleading; either separately counting examples found in the same biblical context with some unique dialectical features falsely increases the number or, far worse, some examples should not even be considered at all since there are other motivations for the use of their peculiar forms.