Some talks from EABS and NACAL
Today’s deal: 2-for-1 on conference reports.
European Association for Biblical Studies Annual Conference, 20-23 July 2026, Leuven
This was my first time visiting this conference, prompted by co-chairing (with Nili Samet) the new research unit Biblical Hebrew Language and Linguistics. This research unit will return for next year’s EABS in London (CfP to go public by the end of October). For those who are already interested in submitting an abstract:
The Biblical Hebrew Language and Linguistics research unit invites submissions for the 2027 London meeting in two areas:
- An open session (or several open sessions) exploring Biblical Hebrew, broadly defined, from both traditional and innovative research perspectives. This includes various methodologies such as classical philology, linguistic analyses informed by both established and up-and-coming linguistic theories, emerging digital research methods, and others.
- A special session focused on non-Tiberian traditions of Biblical Hebrew, whether attested in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, or the Modern period.
For all sessions, we especially encourage young researchers to present their work in progress or recent findings and are open to dedicated panels on the topic of ongoing research projects within the field of Biblical Hebrew. Abstracts should clearly state the presentation’s research question, (anticipated) conclusion, and relevance.
Revisiting Leuven for this year’s edition was a lot of fun and I think our first BHLL sessions went very well. At some point after getting back, however, I lost the little notebook I brought to the talks. So here are some vague recollections, going by the programme.
Entrance to the opening receptionKristin Weingart (LMU Munich) talked about the sources for royal reigns mentioned in Kings and Chronicles. She plausibly distinguished between “real, reconstructed, and imagined sources”. The book of Kings’ “Chronicles of the Kings of Israel/Judah” etc. probably refers to historically real documents. The “Book of the Acts of Solomon” (1 Kgs 11:41), however, stands out and was probably made up or inferred by a later writer as the source behind the data on Solomon’s reign. The biblical book of Chronicles, in turn, cites all kinds of sources like “the miḏrāš of the Prophet Iddo” that are probably not real and may have been motivated by the Greek tradition of sources-based historiography. I actually wonder whether this use of miḏrāš (from d-r-š ‘to seek, investigate’) is a calque of Greek ἱστορία.
KU Leuven university library on Belgian National Day (July 21st)Na’ama Pat-El (UT Austin) elaborated on her idea that the *-t- in some BH weak verb infinitives is historically unrelated to the feminine suffix. Historically I’m not sure, but she presents very compelling evidence that at least synchronically it’s not a feminine marker.
Tania Notarius (University of the Free State/Polis Institute) argued that the Ugaritic function of ṯʿy-priest, held by the most important scribe of the preserved Ugaritic corpus (Ilimilku), was related to the cult of the rpu͗m (Rephaim).
Svenja Lueg (VU Amsterdam), who unfortunately couldn’t make it in person, talked about differential object marking with ditransitive verbs, an underexplored part of BH syntax.
Geoffrey Khan (University of Cambridge) presented on the question of narrative yiqṭol and weqaṭal in BH.
Raanan Eichler (Bar-Ilan University), also online, showed that the ləḇīḇōṯ that Amnon had Tamar prepare him probably derive their name from lēḇ in the sense of ‘(female) chest’ and were most likely intended as suggestively breast-shaped dumplings.
Finally got a chance to visit Leuven’s iconic Domus brewery/restaurant; good to get some closure on that but the food and drink were unremarkableThe last morning saw our special session on new advances in linguistic periodization of BH:
Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) continued the debate over the validity of linguistic periodization, especially (if I recall correctly) in light of his own recent work.
I presented a case study of a method developed by Chiara Bozzone to employ Homeric formulas for dating purposes and whether it can be applied to BH, using the example of a certain formula in the Holiness Code (H) and (arguably) post-H texts.
John Screnock (University of Oxford) highlighted some statistical arguments against the periodization model that emerge from a full consideration of the data.
Natascha Grabowsky (Technical University Dortmund) examined the distribution of different year-dating formulas and the possible implications for the dating of the relevant texts.
Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen), also on the sceptical side, noted some changes that don’t behave neatly and ways in which the complicated history of redaction and vocalization plays tricks on us.
Finally, Nili Samet (Bar-Ilan University) presented some of the same kind of complex changes and, among other things, introduced what I think she called the Late Spelling Paradox: increasing plene spelling in Late Biblical Hebrew sometimes disambiguates archaic forms that could be plastered over by the reading tradition in earlier texts where they were spelled defectively. As a result, sometimes archaic features seem to increase in frequency in late texts, if you identify them based on the vocalized Masoretic Text.
And beyond our research unit, I enjoyed the last talk of the conference (one of several in parallel) by Innocent Himbaza (University of Fribourg), who suggested that Psalm 37 is half early and half late, with late additions alternating with parts of the early base text.
49th North Atlantic Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, 30 September-2 October 2026, Paris
Probably my favourite conference, which I hadn’t attended since covid, in one of my favourite cities, let’s gooo
Lots and lots of interesting talks and conversations here, but for the sake of brevity I’m just going to mention the ones I took notes on and my own.
Remember Edith Piaf? This is her now. Feel old yet?The talks were off to a strong start with Simon Korneev‘s (University of Cambridge) argument for epiglottal, rather than pharyngeal consonants in Semitic. This can explain the vowel fronting effects they cause in various languages and traditions. Handy rule of thumb for identification in the field: “If it sounds like Louis Armstrong, it’s probably epiglottal.”
Maarten Kossmann (Leiden University) compared the consonantal phonemes of two corpora of Eastern Libyco-Berber inscriptions to his reconstruction of Proto-Berber (Proto-Amazigh) and found that the represented LB is neither an ancestor nor a descendant of Proto-Berber, but likely a sister language. We miiight be able to make it ancestral to PB if we assume they didn’t write glottal stops (realized as creaky voice or some other suprasegmental feature on the vowel?).
Lior Laks, also presenting on behalf of Maha Nassar (both Bar-Ilan University) presented their research into Western European (especially English) loanwords into Palestinian Arabic as seen online and tried to explain why you sometimes get doublets like kōran vs. tkōran ‘to get covid’. The availability and productivity of periphrastic alternatives (e.g. axad dūš ‘to take a shower’ competing with tdawwaš) plays a large part in explaining how loanwords are adapted.
Korneev citing Al-Jallad under the latter’s imperious gazeMatthew Morgenstern (Tel Aviv University) presented a talk he had wanted to give at our DOT workshop on Semitic reading traditions, speaking on Mandaic. Looking at spelling, it’s important to note that published Mandaic texts are almost all from manuscripts that postdate the 16th century CE. The earlier (5th-7th c. CE), magical texts often show more conservative from an Aramaic perspective, defective spelling. But interestingly, what is now identified as the ancestor of the Mandaic script, that of Elymaean Aramaic (early 2nd-early 3rd c. CE), already has widespread plene spellings of word-internal long a. So this was not a Mandaic innovation. In other ways, the Mandean tradition, which never developed a full vocalization system, largely relied on oral transmission of how to pronounce the texts. Only after the disastrous cholera epidemic of 1831 was this partially supported by Arabic transcriptions.
Mila Neishtadt (recently Tel Aviv University) very deftly combined two earlier ideas and lots of data on the representation of Aramaic š as either š or s in Arabic place names. In a nutshell, earlier borrowing gives s (as expected) and later borrowing gives š, with the geographic distribution (mostly š in Lebanon and the Galilee) resulting from mountain villages sticking to Aramaic for longer.
Julien Dufour (École normale supérieure) presented some very compelling but hard to interpret evidence that Modern South Arabian derived verbs used to have a voiceless consonant prefix wherever Arabic and Akkadian have u prefix vowels, notably in the D-stem as well as the C-stem. Dufour suggests these are ultimately all the same prefix, but that the one on the D-stem (and some other places) was already partially lenited in Proto-Semitic. Full, detailed handout presumably forthcoming on his Academia page.
I presented my ongoing work on reconstructing the North Semitic letter names as part of our alphabet project. Lots of great feedback on traditions I had missed and questionable steps in my argumentation.
Ahmad Al-Jallad (Ohio State University) and Alessia Prioletta (CNRS) argued that the Ge’ez script does not descend from Ancient South Arabian but is just one member of the larger South Semitic script family, closer in some ways to various Ancient North Arabian varieties (which just means everything apart from Ancient South Arabian). Only took them two slides to flip me from very sceptical to fully convinced. (Ahmad is giving a related talk in Leiden in two weeks, details upon request.)
Enam al-Wer‘s (University of Essex) keynote address gave an overview of the sociolinguistic research into Arabic conducted by her and her students over the past decades. One interesting coincidence that stood out to me is that the border between what they call Horani and Mu’abi dialects in Jordan pretty much aligns with the Moabite border before Mesha’s revolt, which was not the Arnon. I don’t think there’s a direct historical connection, but I wonder what in the landscape there makes Wadi al-Hedan (pronunciation corrected by Prof. al-Wer) a more natural border than Wadi Mujib.
Got jumpscared by Notre-Dame walking back from the conference dinnerHugo Cartwright (independent researcher) kindly provided a talk to fill a gap in the program, presenting his computational research on alphabetic orders in abjads. You can check out his work at www.abjads.org.
Maarten Mous (Leiden University) and five not physically present co-authors presented a big finding from the Cushitic realm. The Mbugu people of Tanzania speak both “Normal Mbugu”, a not very exciting Bantu language, and “Inner Mbugu”, which has large-scale lexical replacement and is often cited as a mixed language. Mous et al. now find that the most archaic layer of the Inner Mbugu lexicon is closely related to Dahalo, the phonologically very exotic (East? South? Narrow?) Cushitic language spoken by a hunter-gatherer group in Kenya. They posit that a now extinct “Old Dahaloan” language, spoken by pastoralists, provided both the core Inner Mbugu lexicon and the target of shift for the ancestors of the present-day Dahalo, who quite probably originally spoke some other language.
Finally, Massinissa Garaoun (CNRS) presented an in-depth investigation of the toponymy of the Canary Islands. By connecting features in the landscape to Amazigh words for body parts, he was able to show to the full satisfaction of those audience members who know what they are talking about that they are etymologically Amazigh (Berber), not para-Berber or something else.
Greatly enjoyable as both of these conferences were, they will also remain linked in my memory to the passing of three individuals. Hector Patmore, one of the organisers of the Leuven EABS meeting, tragically and suddenly passed away on 13 September 2026; see In Memoriams here. Harry Stroomer, Leiden University professor emeritus of Afro-Asiatic languages and cultures, died on 19 July 2026 (In Memoriam here); NACAL opened with a presentation in his memory by Marijn van Putten (Leiden University). Furthermore, Marijn’s own talk (on the apparently irregular preservation of a verbal noun prefix in Berber) was based in part on comments made by, and formally co-presented with, brilliant NACAL-goer Adam Strich (Harvard University), who died on 10 January 2019. זֵכֶר צַדִּיק לִבְרָכָה (Proverbs 10:7).
New (2025) icon of the Syriac saints Addai and Mari in the restored Notre-Dame’s Eastern Christianity chapel #alphabet #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Berber #Bible #Chronicles #conference #Cushitic #GeEz #Hebrew #Kings #Leviticus #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #Pentateuch #ProtoSemitic #Psalms #Ugaritic