For centuries, scholars have approached ancient Hebrew and Syriac languages in an effort to better understand the voices of their authors and situate their writing in their appropriate historical and cultural contexts. In the Shadow of the Author continues this enduring practice by sharing contemporary approaches to uncovering meaning in historical texts from a linguistic perspective and with special emphasis on translation technique and methods in lexicography and linguistic analysis.

This volume offers papers that emerged from the meeting of the International Syriac Language Project (ISLP) which took place at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in September 2016, and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in August 2017. The ISLP invites research not only into Syriac, but extends its range to all ancient language lexicography. Hence its proceedings enrich the whole field of Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek lexicography. The ISLP especially encourages research into the interfaces between these languages, and hence the current volume contains a number of papers on translation equivalence: Hebrew-Greek, Hebrew-Syriac, and Greek-Syriac. Other philologically focused pieces explore matters relating to textual and manuscript traditions. All of these are preceded in the present volume by an extensive review of the production and achievements of the ISLP to date.