Jastrow!!

[Ben Spackman]

Jastrow's Aramaic lexicon of the Targums, Talmud, and Midrash has been given short shrift for a long time. Eerdmans was printing a new edition a few years ago, but then it turned out to be just a reprint. The condition of the text has not been good.

Logos has taken it on
http://www.logos.com/products/prepub/details/5261

[Precha1]

Hi Ben,

Out of curiosity, and assuming you purchase the product from Logos if it goes to publication, how will you use it?

Is this something that can be incorporated into BW? The reason I ask is because I always seem to have difficulty using Logos in conjunction with BW 8.

Thanks,

[MGVH]

There is a review of the 2005 Hendrickson reprint of Jastrow HERE. They enlarged the print but did not edit or improve the typesetting.

I do have the book, but in the meantime, I have also legally downloaded the whole thing in PDF from here: Volume one, Volume two

Even better, use this excellent setup from Tyndale. The whole thing has been broken down alphabetically, and there is a helpful magnifier as well.

The Logos edition will be nice, but I don't see any easy coordination of this resource with BW in the near future.

[Ben Spackman]

MGVH, the link to Tyndale doesn't work. I have the pdfs, and I find them too unwieldy to use with any frequency, though I'm glad to have them.

Precha1, I did two years of Aramaic (Biblical, Imperial, Elephantine, DSS and Targum) as part of my grad work, and this was the primary lexicon we used for non-biblical material. I have put it on pre-order. I don't know that I'll be able to link it to BW at all, since we seem to have trouble passing Hebrew/Aramaic, but I will use it frequently when dealing with Aramaic.

Given that the Targums are the only Aramaic texts BW has, I don't see them integrating this for free, or seeing it as useful enough to contract the database from Logos as a new option-for-pay lexicon.

It's been requested in the past, but the price of scanning was deemed to outweigh its narrow utility, a decision I agree with from BW's perspective.

Edit: I found the Tyndale site, http://www.tyndalearchive.com/tabs/jastrow/
I look forward to the seeing Jastrow in a clean new typeface, and the utility of popups and so forth.