Leiden SSLL and Amsterdam ISBL
Introduction
For the past three weeks (July 13-Aug 3), I’ve been in The Netherlands to attend Leiden University’s annual Summer School in Languages and Linguistics (SSLL) followed by the 2024 International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (ISBL) hosted by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Here’s a short recap of the classes and talks I attended in Leiden and Amsterdam.
Leiden SSLL
Universiteit Leiden’s Centre for Linguistics has been hosting their annual summer school for over 14 years (see some previous iterations here). I attended for the first time last year (July 10-21, 2023) to attend their Semitics program which included four courses: Historical Hebrew Grammar with Benjamin Suchard; Classical Ethiopic with Martin Baasten; Introduction to Safaitic with Ahmad Al-Jallad; and Reconstructing Afroasiatic with, inter alia, Marwan Kilani, Marijn Van Putten, and Benjamin Suchard. While attending the 2023 program, I immediately knew that Leiden was a (the?) center for historical linguistics in Western Europe and that I would return as often as possible. This year, I’m fortunate and thankful to have received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Summer Language Study grant through Hopkins’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences for a second consecutive year which provided financial resources allowing me to return to Leiden again this year. The 2024 program (July 15-26) consisted of about 15 tracks (Altaic; Central-Asiatic; Chinese; Descriptive Linguistics; Language Documentation; Indo-European I; Indo-European II; Italo-Celtic; Indology; Iranian; Linguistic introductions; Papyrology; Russian; Semitics; and Turkology), of which I followed three Semitics plus one Indo-European class.
My first course was Northwest Semitic: Ugaritic and Phoenician with Agustinus Gianto. Professor Gianto (CV here) received his PhD from Harvard University in 1987 and is Emeritus Professor of Semitic Philology and Linguistics at the Pontifical Biblical Institute (PBI) in Rome. (Fun fact: Gianto studied with William Moran in the mid-1980s at the same time my advisor at JHU, Theodore Lewis, was also studying in Harvard’s NELC program with Frank Moore Cross. Ted (CV here) graduated just a year before Gus.) While I’ve taken a few semesters of Ugaritic and Phoenician before, it’s always good to rehearse the fundamentals, and I couldn’t miss the opportunity to study with Gianto. I also met Josephine Quinn (Oxford) and Paula Mollo (PBI and La Sapienza) who were also attending the class as well as other students from around the world.
The second class, also with Prof. Gianto, was Advanced Biblical Hebrew which included an in-depth analysis of select texts from the Hebrew Bible with special attention on syntactic and semantic issues. Gianto calls philology “the art of close reading,” and he modeled it through our discussions of texts such as Job 1-3; Prov 1, 8; Exod 15; Num 23; Deut 32; Qohelet; and various examples of parallelism in Hebrew poetry. Among the many grammatical and philological ideas which he shared, I found his discussions of the “particularizing feminine” as well as cult of the dead and apotropaic magic in Job to be especially interesting.
The third class was Introducing Sabaic: Script, Grammar, and Lexicon with Imar Koutchoukali (academia profile here; X account here). Besides the numerous other reasons for studying Sabaic (e.g., an early attested language from the 1st mill. BCE; relatively conservative phonology; insights into the pre-Islamic history of Yemen and the Horn of Africa), this was an important class for me as Sabaic is one of the few Semitic languages I hadn’t previously studied (and I’m always jealous of my Ethiopicist friend, Michael H., who constantly has interesting things to say about Old South Arabian). Koutchoukali’s class was well-organized as he introduced each session with a chronologically arranged mini-lecture of South Arabian history, followed by the grammatical topic of the day (e.g. phonology, nominal morphology, numerals, etc.), then reading/translation practice (including familiarizing us with online resources such as DASI and Sabaweb).
My fourth class was Historical Grammar of Hittite with Alwin Kloekhorst of Universiteit Leiden (his website here, including CV here). Attested as early as the 18th c. BCE, Hittite is the best-known member of the Anatolian branch which was the first to break off from Proto-Indo-European. Although conceptually the course was intended to be about the diachronic analysis of Hittite grammar, Kloekhorst situated Hittite in its Anatolian context and also discussed Cuneiform Luwian, Hieroglyphic Luwian, and Lycian among other Anatolian (and broader Indo-European, occasionally also even Semitic!) languages. While much of the discussion about synchronic Hittite grammar was outside the scope of my expertise, I very much appreciated the course for the sake of Kloekhorst’s methodology (and personality!). Hearing an Anatolian linguist talk about Indo-European makes me excited about the potential future of Afroasiatic linguistics as our field matures to a similar level (hopefully in my lifetime!).
In addition to the courses, time precludes me from mentioning the many social events of these two weeks, including evening lectures and the famous Brill Pubquiz. I will, however, mention that the dinner arranged my Martin Baasten for a group of Semitists, including Prof. Gianto, Jorik Groen, and others, was certainly a highlight of the trip, as well as my lunch with Prof. Caroline Waerzeggers who I know through the International Association for Assyriology (see here).
In conclusion, I was excited to return to Leiden for the 2024 summer school, and it certainly didn’t disappoint. I gained a lot of knowledge, made new friends and colleagues, and thoroughly enjoyed my time in what has become one of my favorite cities in the world. I can’t wait to return in 2025, and to the extent that I’m able to speak things into reality (even though I’m not), I would personally like to see next year’s Semitics program include some combination of courses like Comparative Semitics, Western Aramaic Dialects (from Jewish Palestinian Aramaic to Western Neo-Aramaic), Classical Mandaic, Rabbinic Hebrew, and/or a Modern South Arabian language. Looking at previous editions of the summer school program though, I fear that there will be some repetition (e.g. Ugaritic which apparently was offered in 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2024).
Here’s my Certificate of Completion for the Leiden SSLL:
Amsterdam ISBL
Immediately following the Leiden summer school, I attended the International SBL conference (July 28-Aug 1) which was conveniently located in Amsterdam. I attended over 40 talks in four days on topics ranging from Hebrew linguistics, Ugaritic texts, and Aramaic Targums to digital humanities and artificial intelligence. Without going into detail (you can read about some of the talks over at Benjamin Suchard’s blog here), here’s a list my favorite talks:
- Marianne Kaajan (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), “How to Analyse Various Types of Seemingly Discontinuous Phrases at the End of the Clause”
- Jorik (F.J.) Groen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), “When בו״א Means “Go””
- Theodore J. Lewis (Johns Hopkins University), “Transgenerational “Right Conduct/Righteousness” (ṣĕdāqâ) in the Book of Ezekiel in Light of Aramean (Sam’alian) ṣidq Potrayals”
- Theodore J Lewis (Johns Hopkins University), “Cultic Reciprocity, Performativity, and Materiality in a Ugarit “Myth-and-Ritual” Text”
- Benjamin Suchard (KU Leuven) and Ivri J. Bunis (University of Haifa), “Biblical Hebrew הלוא זה\זאת\אלה and Medial Deixis Demonstratives”
- Kyle Young (Trinity College Dublin), “Settling for Sperber? Reconsidering Alexander Sperber’s Choice of Base Text for Targum Onqelos”
- Yusuf Çelik (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), “Syriac/Aramaic in the Age of AI”
- Benjamin Suchard (KU Leuven), “Genesis 14 and the E Source”
- The entire session of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls with the theme “The Dutch Contributions to the Study of the Cave 11 Scrolls” (especially Jeffrey Jordan of Boston College, “1Q11: Status Quaestionis and Future Avenues of Research”)
- David J. Shepherd (Trinity College – Dublin), “From 11QtgJob to 11QarJob: 11Q10 in Light of Earlier Aramaic Translation of Akkadian Texts”
- Margaretha Folmer (Leiden University / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), “Under a Magnifying Glass: Thoughts on the Redaction History of Targum Onqelos and Targum Jonathan from a Linguistic Perspective”
- Emanuel Tov (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), “The Correction Procedures of the Judean Desert Texts”
- David M. Smiley (University of Notre Dame), “Digital Revelation: Visualizing Machine Learning Models for Hebraists”
- The entire session of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls with the theme “Józef T. Milik’s Contributions to the Study of Enoch in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Publication of the Books of Enoch”
Postscript
I want to thank several people from whom I learned much in the past three weeks, all mentioned previously in the post: Agustinus Gianto, Imar Koutchoukali, Alwin Kloekhorst, Benjamin Suchard, Ivri Bunis, and Jorik Groen. Shoutout also to Fr. James Page, SJ (currently studying at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome) who also attended both the Leiden SSLL and ISBL in Amsterdam.
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