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ZIPORA TALSHIR, 1 Esdras: A Text Critical Commentary (SBLSCS 50; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001). Pp. xiv + 556. $67.95.
First Esdras has attracted the scholarly attention of Zipora Talshir over a couple of decades. Her recent book 1 Esdras-From Origin to Translation (SBLSCS 47; Atlanta: SBL, 1999) was written in collaboration with David Talshir and effectively forms an introduction to this new commentary, which provides some of the detailed analysis that lay behind the earlier volume. But her primary aim is "to establish the text of I Esd as reflected in its Greek version and to discern its relationship with the MT" (p. x). Accordingly, after brief introductions, she presents each section of the 1974 Gottingen edition of the LXX in parallel with a reconstructed Hebrew or Aramaic Vorlage. Where the text has parallels with the MT, the Vorlage is basically the BHS without vowels and accents. In the case of the story of the three guardsmen, T. reconstructs an Aramaic text based on her knowledge of the translator's technique and "our knowledge of Aramaic" (p. 129). Aware of the precarious nature of such an enterprise, she offers this reconstruction with due modesty: "we beg the reader to take the reconstruction with a grain of salt" (p. 129). Notes of a diachronic nature accompany the Vorlage throughout, almost on a verse-by-verse basis. These notes concentrate primarily on the textual and philological issues, and often justify a particular reconstruction.
Talshir's 1999 work put forward three main...