Few articles in this issue: Ruti Bardenstein and Noam Frey | The Secularization of Hebrew slixa (‘Sorry’, ‘Excuse Me’, ‘Pardon’) Mitka R. Golub | The Element בעל in Personal Names from Archaeological Excavations in the Land of Israel during the Iron Age II Period and from the Bible Chanoch Gamiel | Two Different Lexical Approaches: Rashi vs. Ibn Ezra Jonathan Howard | The Biblical Text of Gesenius–Kautzsch: An Addendum to Halivni’s Paper Yehonatan Wormser | From פֵּאוּר to דָּגֶש לְתִפְאֶרֶת הַקְּרִיאָה: Change and Development in the Use of a Hebrew Grammatical Term

Few articles in this issue: Uri Ehrlich and Vered Raziel-Kretzmer | Prose or Poetry? - Clarifying the Eretz Israel Version of the ‘You Smote’ Passage in the Maʿariv Prayer Avi Shmidman | Did Palestinian Qinnot Serve as Seliḥot in the Babylonian Rite? Michael Rand | Interdigitated Piyyutim and the Principle of Polyphonic Performance in Late Eastern Piyyut Ophir Münz-Manor | Analog Piyyut in a Digital World: Towards Computational Study of Payytanic Literature Eden Hacohen | ‘God has made the one as well as the other’ ‒ Parallels and their Deconstruction in Piyyut Dalet of Yannai’s Qedushta’ot

The Second Commandment’s injunction against making graven images and likenesses resonates in all facets of Jewish visuality throughout the generations. Although Jews have always created and consumed art, the attitude to figural art –anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations – has oscillated, like a pendulum, between strict prohibition and full permissibility. Figureless Art traces a lesser-known chapter in the history of Jewish art – a period governed by the swing to extreme stringency that left its mark on Late Antique synagogues in the Land of Israel. This anti-figural trend manifested in the avoidance of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic depictions and in the deliberate obliteration of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures on stone carvings and mosaic carpets that adorned the synagogues. What is the meaning of this strict trend? Did it emerge from within the Jewish world or was it stimulated, conversely, by external influences? Who was responsible for the effacement of the figures in the synagogues and when did these iconoclastic events occur? This book examines these phenomena through a broad historical, religious, and cultural perspective, based on visual and literary sources from Late Antique and early Muslim Palestine.

This anthology is a collection of stories, written by women at the turn of the twentieth century and published in the Yiddish press at that time. The have been translated to Hebrew for the first time. From its beginning the Yiddish press enabled all levels of society to sound their voices. Women too were quick to meet this challenge, and until the First World War more than ninety of their works were published: novellas, plays, fiction and a wide variety of short stories. This collection of nineteen stories represents this abundance and its unique qualities. It sounds anew the voices of forgotten women authors, who disappeared even from the eyes of critics and researchers: Maria Lerner, Isabella, Rokhl Brokhes, Yente Serdetsky, Salome Perl, Rokhl Feigenberg and others. Their stories open a window to the world of women at a time of dramatic changes in the lives of Jews in the Russian Empire. They portray conflicts between the generations, especially between the authors and their mothers, the dilemmas of love, and the anguished movement between the small town and the big city, between maintaining traditions and breaking free of frameworks. These stories highly enrich our knowledge of Jewish society at that time and are a fundamental expression of the part women played in that society.

The dictionary is the fruit of a three-decade long research on the vocabulary distinctive of the contemporary Georgian-Jewish language, and especially its Hebrew component. This research is based on ongoing field work performed in various places in Georgia and in Israel. The vocabulary reflects the uniqueness of the language and culture, and to a large extent also the anthropology and history of the community of Georgian Jews.

Few articles in this issue: Haim Hayun | Between Bible and Midrash: The Story of Abram and Sarai in Egypt (Genesis 12:10–20) and the Story of Moses’ Birth (Exodus 2:1–10) Bnayahu Bronner | On Ḥerem Adam (Proscription of Persons) and its Significance: The Temple as a Place of Freedom and Justice Hagit Shabtai | Prophetic Rebuke and Northern Redaction: Judges 6:7–10 as a Test Case for Understanding the Processes of Composition and Redaction in Judges and the Deuteronomistic History Noach Hayut | Individual and Collective Retribution in the Book of Kings

Chronicle of French and Ottoman Kings was written by a sixteenth-century Jewish doctor of Spanish origin living in Italy. According to the writer, his intention was to document the hardships and injustices suffered by Jews in the Diaspora - especially the expulsion of Jews from Spain and France - and include them in the history of the conflict between the French kinds and Ottoman Empire over the rule in "the land of Judea and Jerusalem." In effect, this is a story, set in chronological order, of selected events in world history, similar in structure and content to hundreds of writings published at the time. It was written in fine biblical Hebrew, and as such was aimed at an audience who knew the language and could appreciate the conflict between the French kings and the Ottoman Empire as representing world history.

Contiruptance: Poetical Fluctuations in Naomi Frankel’s Work is the first book dedicated to Frankel's literary work, offering an in-depth reading of her entire fictional oeuvre. The concept of "Contiruptance," which indicates ruptures and continuity, provides insight into Frankel's poetics; suggesting that it may serve to deepen the analysis of the works of other authors.

We are pleased to present readers with volume 19–20 of the journal Massorot , dedicated from its inception to research on Hebrew and Jewish language traditions. The present volume contains 12 articles and a book review. They reflect the investigations of 16 researchers, since three of the articles were produced through the fruitful collaboration of two authors. Five of the articles deal with diverse aspects of Judeo-Arabic, both in the Middle Ages and the modern era. Moshe Bar-Asher focuses on disparate translations of a single Biblical Hebrew lexical item in the Maghrebian Sharḥ or literal Bible-translation tradition, and Gabriel Rosenbaum discusses the unique language of the Karaites of Egypt, a variety of Arabic containing distinctive words and expressions of Hebrew origin. Yosef Yuval Tobi analyzes Arabic poetic verses employed by grammarians and philosophers writing in Judeo-Arabic during the Middle Ages. Nahem Ilan reviews the new lexicon of medieval Judeo-Arabic (Jerusalem, 2016) by Mordechai Akiva Friedman, and Rachel Hasson offers a detailed analysis of the language of two Judeo-Arabic folktales from the Cairo Genizah. The contribution by Yehudit Henshke demonstrates the influence of spoken Maghrebian Judeo-Arabic on the Hebrew of Israeli immigrants from Morocco and their descendants. The article by Yael Reshef and Einat Gonen, too, focuses on influences on spoken Hebrew — in this instance, traces of traditional Ashkenazi Hebrew on the Hebrew spoken in Israel in the early 1960s. The volume includes English abstracts.

In this book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel, the famed historian G. W. Bowersock presents an examination of political developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of the rise of Islam. Recounting the growth of Christian Ethiopia and the conflict with Jewish Arabia, he describes the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the late Sassanian (Persian) Empire. He concludes that the Byzantine Empire's defeat of the Sassanian forces, which destabilized the region, provided the opportunity for the rise and military success of Islam in the seventh century. Using close readings of surviving texts, Bowersock sheds new light on the complex causal relationships among the Byzantine, Ethiopian, Persian, and emerging Islamic forces.

The dictionary mainly covers the Hebrew component in languages that have not been documented or that have been documented less than that of the prestigious Judeo-languages, Yiddish and Latino. Thus, it encompasses the different dialects of Judeo-Arabic from North Africa, Yemen and Iraq, and to some extent from Syria, Judeo-Georgian and Judeo-Persian. Other languages are included sporadically. It also includes Haketiya (Moroccan Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Italian and others.