Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations"
Now showing items 21-40 of 40
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Many Peoples of Obscure Speech and Difficult Language: Attitudes towards Linguistic Diversity in the Hebrew Bible
(2015-09-19)The subject of this dissertation is the awareness of linguistic diversity in the Hebrew Bible—that is, the recognition evident in certain biblical texts that the world’s languages differ from one another. Given the frequent ... -
The Nature and Import of the Relationship Between the Joseph Story in Genesis and the Book of Esther
(2016-08-09)This study offers an extended, detailed examination of the nature and character of the relationship between the story of Joseph in Genesis and the book of Esther. While also engaging the court narratives found in the first ... -
The Poetics of Aging: Spain and Sicily at the Twilight of Muslim Sovereignty
(2013-03-08)Aging as a physical, aesthetic and intellectual process gained, after muhdath poetry, a position of prominence in Classical Arabic poetry and poetics. Despite its relevance to the development of subgenres such as that of ... -
Pottery Production at the Phoenician Colony of El Castillo De Doña Blanca (El Puerto De Santa María, Spain) C. 750-550 BCE
(2015-05-15)This dissertation uses scientific analysis of pottery to examine social and economic process at a Phoenician colony in the Bay of Cádiz, Spain. Previous research on the Phoenician colonial economies has neglected social ... -
Reconceiving the House of the Father: Royal Women at Ugarit
(2014-06-06)Every father is the son of a mother. While this would appear to be a commonplace, studies of patrimonialism as a political system in the ancient Near East have rarely considered its implications. Royal women, as objects ... -
The Regional Economy of the Southern Levant in the 8th-7th Centuries BCE
(2015-05-12)The late Iron Age in the ancient Near East was a period marked by dramatic changes. Politically, the rise of the Neo-Assyrian empire ushers in the beginning of imperial rule. At the same time, Phoenician expansion efforts ... -
Sacred Slaughter: The Discourse of Priestly Violence as Refracted Through the Zeal of Phinehas in the Hebrew Bible and in Jewish Literature
(2015-09-24)The story of Phinehas’ zealous slaying of an Israelite man and the Midianite woman with whom he dared consort in public (Numbers 25) is perhaps the most notorious of a number of famed pentateuchal narratives that are marked ... -
Same-Sex Sexual Acts and the Making of the Islamic Tradition
(2015-05-20)This study is an exploration of the ways in which early Islamic conceptualizations and judgments concerning liwāṭ (male-male anal copulation) and siḥāq (tribadism) were not simply based on self-evident Scriptural passages, ... -
The Sea in the Hebrew Bible: Myth, Metaphor, and Muthos
(2014-06-06)The dissertation recounts the variegated journey of the sea in the Hebrew Bible through the lens of myth, metaphor, and muthos. The journey begins outside the Bible in ancient Near Eastern sea myths exemplified by the ... -
Sholem Schwarzbard: Biography of a Jewish Assassin
(2012-11-01)The thesis represents the first complete academic biography of a Jewish clockmaker, warrior poet and Anarchist named Sholem Schwarzbard. Schwarzbard's experience was both typical and unique for a Jewish man of his era. ... -
Singing Moses's Song: A Performance-Critical Analysis of Deuteronomy's Song of Moses
(2013-09-04)Starting from the observation that Deuteronomy commands a tradition of performing the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32.1-43), in this dissertation I explore ways in which the performance of the Song contributes to Deuteronomy's ... -
Staging Jewish Modernism: The Vilna Troupe and the Rise of a Transnational Yiddish Art Theater Movement
(2013-09-30)This is the first study of the avant-garde Yiddish art theater movement, which flourished across five continents during the interwar period. From Warsaw to San Francisco, Buenos Aires to Winnipeg, Mexico City to Paris, and ... -
Textual Loss and Recovery in the Hebrew Bible
(2013-02-11)This dissertation is a study of four ancient stories about the creation and transmission of all or part of the Hebrew Bible: Moses and the stone tablets (Exodus 32-34), Josiah and the discovery of the law-book (2 Kings ... -
The Old Assyrian Social Network: An Analysis of the Texts From Kültepe-Kanesh (1950-1750 B.C.E.)
(2018-09-26)A dissertation combing both quantitative and qualitative analyses to describe the Old Assyrian social networks, the remains of a Middle Bronze Age (IIa) merchant colony with surviving documents from 1970 to 1720 B.C.E. ... -
Torah From Zion: Gentile Conversion and Law Observance in the Septuagint of Isaiah
(2017-05-02)The book of Isaiah envisions a future where foreigners will one day receive torah and worship Yahweh, but neither the text nor its later interpretation is univocal in its understanding of the relationship between foreigners ... -
Toward the Meaning of the Biblical Hebrew Piel Stem
(2015-03-31)The biblical Hebrew D stem (piel) seems to be inconsistent from verb to verb, both in its meaning and in its relationship to the G stem (qal). For example, the D stem has a higher valency than the G stem for some verbs ... -
Transforming the Tradition: Soundplay as an Interpretive Device in Innerbiblical Allusions
(2014-06-06)The present study concerns the use in the Hebrew Bible of paronomasia (soundplay) for the purpose of alluding to and interpreting antecedent literary traditions also found in the Bible. The focus of the investigation lies ... -
Travel, Travel Writing and the "Means to Victory" in Modern South Asia
(2015-05-16)This dissertation is a history of the idea of travel in South Asia as it found expression in Urdu travel writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though travel has always been integral to social life in South ... -
TWISTED THREADS: GENESIS, DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF THE TERM AND CONCEPT OF TAWATUR IN ISLAMIC THOUGHT
(2014-06-06)Tawātur is the concept that if we obtain the same information through a sufficient number of independent channels, we reach certainty about that data. When applied to the transmission of Qur'ān and hadith texts, tawātur ... -
Writing Amrika: Literary Encounters with America in Arabic Literature
(2014-10-22)My dissertation, Writing Amrika: Literary Encounters with America in Arabic Literature is an examination of this cross-cultural literary encounter primarily through fictional prose written in Arabic from the beginning of ...