Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

Book Reviews
much anticipated. The author has also just finished A Dictionary of Judean Aramaic
(DJA), which covers texts from 150 B.C.E. until 200 C.E., and plans are afoot for a history
of rabbinic lexicography. Thus, there can be little doubt that Sokoloff is the most prolific
lexicographer of Aramaic of his generation.
The present reviewer organized a conference on Aramaic lexicography at the University
of Sheffield, July 23–25, 2002, and there had the pleasure of meeting Sokoloff
and hearing about the methods he used to produce these dictionaries. Much of this
information is in the public domain already (see the following papers by Sokoloff: “The
Current State of Research on Galilean Aramaic,” JNES 37 [1978]: 161–68; “The Dictionary
of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic: Progress and Prospects,” in Studia Aramaica [ed.
Geller et al.; JSS Supplement 4; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], 189–97). The
vast majority of errors highlighted by reviewers of the first edition have been corrected
in the second edition, in addition to many discovered by Sokoloff himself. For those who
already own the first edition and consider $109 too much to invest, however, an alternative
would be to purchase the Addenda et Corrigenda, which is to be made available
separately by the Bar Ilan University Press.
DJPA covers the Aramaic vocabulary of the Jewish literary and epigraphic sources
from the land of Israel from the third century C.E. until after the Arab conquest. These
sources are grouped by Sokoloff as follows: inscriptions, mostly from synagogues but
also including tombstones and the like; targumic sources such as Targum Neofiti to the
Pentateuch and the Cairo Genizah fragments; midrashic sources from the land of Israel;
talmudic sources from the land of Israel; Gaonic-period halakic sources from the
Genizah; poetry from Egyptian papyri and the Genizah; papyri containing correspondence
and other documents from Egypt; magical texts, specifically amulets discovered
in the land of Israel and the Genizah; marriage contracts, again from Egypt and the
Genizah; and, finally, the marginal notes to the Bible in the Masoretic codices.
For each of these genres Sokoloff provides a detailed list of the textual sources
used in the compilation of DJPA (pp. 19–28), and also an index for all cited passages,
again divided according to genre and source (pp. 595–820).
Until now, for the dialects covered by Sokoloff’s two Jewish Aramaic dictionaries,
we have had recourse mainly to Jacob Levy, Wörterbuch über die Talmudim und
Midraschim (Berlin: Harz, 1924), and Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim,
the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (London: Putnam,
1903). These are out of date, however, as they were produced prior to a number of significant
studies on Aramaic lexicography, the publication of new sources that have come
to light from the Cairo Genizah and other locations, and the production of more reliable
text editions of the various corpora. The problems inherent in the study of the Jewish
Aramaic dialects are compounded in both Levy and Jastrow by the inclusion of postbiblical
Hebrew words and the lack of any delineation with respect to dialect and text
type. The significance of Sokoloff’s contribution to Aramaic lexicography is the clear
division between the Western and Eastern Jewish Aramaic dialects in his dictionaries. It
is not an exaggeration to say that for the first time we have dictionaries of Jewish Aramaic
that are sound in terms of both dialectology and lexicography. Furthermore, the
etymological references in Levy and especially Jastrow are not a strong feature of those
lexicons, but Sokoloff’s dictionaries provide a firm though not exhaustive etymological
383