northwest semitic philology and the hebrew fragments of Ben Sira

Penar, Tadeusz “Biblica et orientalia” 28 1975, pp. XVI-114 This volume is a revised and expanded version of Penar’s doctoral dissertation “Philological Notes on the Hebrew Fragments of Ben Sira”. The author criticizes the text-critical approach of many studies on these fragments. Its effectiveness is weakened by the unreliability of the ancient versions, which, swarm with corruptions and errors. Progress in Northwest Semitic philology has given new insights into a lot of grammatical peculiarities of Hebrew and an enormous number of biblical texts, regarded as corrupt, could be explained without resorting to emendation. The purpose of this dissertation is to shed new light on a series of passages from Ben Sira by applying the principles of Northwest Semitic philology.