Much focus in research on alphabetic writing systems has been on correspondences between graphemes and phonemes. The present study sets out to complement these by examining the linguistic denotation of markers of word division in several ancient Northwest Semitic (NWS) writing systems, namely, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Moabite, and Hebrew, as well as alphabetic Greek. While in Modern European languages words on the page are separated on the basis of morphosyntax, I argue that in most NWS writing systems words are divided on the basis of prosody: ‘words’ are units which must be pronounced together with a single primary accent or stress, or as a single phrase. After an introduction providing the necessary theoretical groundwork, Part I considers word division in Phoenician inscriptions. I show that word division at the levels of both the prosodic word and of the prosodic phrase may be found in Phoenician, and that the distributions match those of prosodic words and prosodic phrases in Tiberian Hebrew. The latter is a source where, unlike the rest of the material considered, the prosody is well represented. In Part II, word division in Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform is analyzed. Here two-word division strategies are identified, corresponding broadly to two genres of text: viz, literary, and administrative documents. Word division in the orthography of literary and of some other texts separates prosodic words. By contrast, in many administrative (and some other) documents, words are separated on the basis of morphosyntax, anticipating later word division strategies in Europe by several centuries. Part III considers word division in the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition of Biblical Hebrew. Here word division is found to mark out ‘minimal prosodic words’. I show that this word division orthography is also found in early Moabite and Hebrew inscriptions. Word division in alphabetic Greek inscriptions is the topic of Part IV. Whilst it is agreed that word division marks out prosodic words, the precise relationship of these units to the pitch accent and the rhythm of the language is not so clear, and consequently this issue is addressed in detail. Finally, the Epilogue considers the societal context of word division in each of the writing systems examined, to attempt to discern the rationales for the prosodic word division strategies adopted. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

Writing in the ancient Mediterranean existed against a backdrop of very high levels of interaction and contact. In the societies around its shores, writing was a dynamic practice that could serve many purposes – from a tool used by elites to control resources and establish their power bases to a symbol of local identity and a means of conveying complex information and ideas. This volume presents a group of papers by members of the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) research team and visiting fellows, offering a range of different perspectives and approaches to problems of writing in the ancient Mediterranean. They focus on practices, viewing writing as something that people do within a wider social and cultural context, and on adaptations, considering the ways in which writing changed and was changed by the people using it.

Series: Pericope 4 - Scripture as written and read in antiquity Bible scholars and translators are often confronted with the problem of sectioning biblical texts. Until recently sentence division and paragraphing were largely left to the imagination of the individual scholar. This resulted in a wide range of different divisions of one and the same text. There is, however, a lot of long neglected evidence on how the ancient scribes themselves understood the structure of the texts they were transmitting. Research in ancient scribal traditions shows that in the entire ancient Near East scribes provided their texts with special, structuring markers. For example, rulings, lines left open, extra large capitals, different colouring at the beginning of new passages, and for the division into smaller units, strokes, dots and spaces. Actually many markers lending structure to our modern texts appear to be derived from very ancient customs. This volume contains the papers read during the Third Pericope Meeting held in connection with the SBL International Meeting at Berlin, 2002. Topics discussed are the unit delimitation in parts of Genesis, Numbers, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Psalms, and Song of Songs. Furthermore general studies on Masoretic accentuation, the importance of pausal forms for unit delimitation, description of scribal practices in the Jewish tradition, as well as unit division in Northwest Semitic texts are included. Pericope is a new successful series that aims at making available data on unit delimitation found in biblical and related manuscripts to the scholarly world and to evaluate these data for the benefit of biblical interpretation. From the Contents R. de Hoop, Genesis 49 Revisited: The Poetic Structure of Jacob's Testament and the Ancient Versions R. de Hoop, `Trichotomy' in Masoretic Accentuation in Comparison with the Delimitation of Units in the Versions: With Special Attention to the Introduction to Direct Speech M.C.A. Korpel, The Priestly Blessing Revisited (Num. 6:22-27) M.C.A. Korpel, WhoIs Who? The Structure of Canticles 8:1-7 I. Kottsieper, Zu graphischen Abschnittsmarkierungen in nordwestsemitischen Texten J.M. Oesch, Skizze einer formalen Gliederungshermeneutik der Sifre Tora J.W. Olley, Trajectories in Paragraphing of the Book of Ezekiel G.T.M. Prinsloo, Unit Delimitation in the Egyptian Hallel (Psalms 113{118) P. Sanders, Pausal Forms and the Delimitation of Cola in Biblical Hebrew Poetry E. Ulrich, Impressions and Intuition: Sense Divisions in Ancient Manuscripts of Isaiah

The late Mitchell Dahood who lectured in Northwest Semitic languages at the Pontifical Biblical institute from 1956-1982 made numerous, often very original suggestions for interpreting the Hebrew text of the Old Testament.