Before, during and after the preparation of Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques, Wilfred Watson published several articles on Hebrew poetry in a wide range of periodicals. The present volume collects together the most significant of these writings, including a chapter from a book on chiasmus, as well as a few unpublished items. After an opening survey of current work on Hebrew verse the articles cover the following topics: parallelism (including half-line parallelism, previously almost unnoticed), antithesis, word pairs, chiasmus, figurative language and introductions to speech in verse. The last section deals with structural devices and a folktale motif in narrative verse, hyperbole, apostrophe and alliteration. Previously unpublished items are on the contribution of ethnopoetics, from the study of Native American literature to Hebrew narrative verse (a new topic in biblical studies), parallelism in the Song of Songs and a metaphor in Jeremiah. This anthology is intended as a companion volume to Classical Hebrew Poetry. It includes additions and corrections to that book and there are also several indices.>

To mark the retirement of John F. A. Sawyer, Professor of Religious Studies in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, colleagues and former students from around the world have contributed studies on his areas of interest: the study of Hebrew, the books of the Jewish Bible, and the culture and traditions of Judaism. The essayists consider not simply the origin of the meaning of word and text, but also the many and strange ways in which word and text become transposed, re-oriented and often enough traduced by later interests and purposes. The roll call of scholars reads: Philip Alexander, Francis Andersen, Graeme Auld, Calvin Carmichael, Robert Carroll, David Clines, Richard Coggins, Jon Davies, Philip Davies, James Dunn, John Elwolde, John Gibson, Graham Harvey, Peter Hayman, Dermot Killingley, Jonathan Magonet, Robert Morgan, Takamitsu Muraoka, Christopher Rowland, Deborah Sawyer, Clyde Curry Smith, Max Sussman, William Telford, Marc Vervenne, Wilfred Watson, Keith Whitelam and Isabel Wollaston.>

This text deals with the origins of the Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. It discusses its linguistic and cultural frame and its relation to the hebrew text and to the Qumran documents. It includes the early revisions and the Christian recensions as well as other issues such as the relation of the Septuagint to Hellenism, to the New Testament and to early Christian literature.

One of the world's foremost experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran community that produced them provides an authoritative new English translation of the two hundred longest and most important nonbiblical Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran, along with an introduction to the history of the discovery and publication of each manuscript and the background necessary for placing each manuscript in its actual historical context.

In spite of debatable issues, such as metre, we now know enough about classical Hebrew poetry to be able to understand how it was composed. This large-scale manual, rich in detail, exegesis and bibliography, provides guidelines for the analysis and appreciation of Hebrew verse. Topics include oral poetry, metre, parallelism and forms of the strophe and stanza. Sound patterns and imagery are also discussed. A lengthy chapter sets out a whole range of other poetic devices and the book closes with a set of worked examples of Hebrew poetry. Throughout, other ancient Semitic verse has been used for comparison and the principles of modern literary criticism have been applied.

Since the mid-twentieth century Ugaritic studies has witnessed an enormous increase of edited texts. Naturally, but scattered in numerous publications, at the same time huge advances have been made in epigraphy, grammatical analysis and lexicography.
The current dictionary is an updated and considerably augmented English edition - prepared by W.G.E. Watson - of G. Del Olmo Lete and J. Sanmartin, "Diccionario de la lengua ugaritica. It systematically brings together all insights gained so far, and provides answers to numerous existing lexical problems by applying new techniques of lexicographical analysis, and at the same time drawing from conclusions reached in other branches of Semitic philology.
The work is a complete inventory of words (morphemes) and meanings, affixes and proper names of Ugarit as studied so far. With isolexemes, full bibliographical references and translations in context.
A true, modern and indispensable key to understanding Ugarit.