Despite great effort, grammarians have been unable to explain the verbal system of biblical Aramaic through standard categories of tense and aspect. Shepherd (Old Testament and Hebrew, Louisiana College) has found a remedy for this situation through distributional analysis, showing that biblical Aramaic has a primary verbal form for narration and another for discourse. Through his analysis he has found this holds true for non-biblical texts. He describes the modern history of research on the topic, text-linguistic methodologies, database results and extra-biblical parallels. The result is useful for professionals as well as students. Annotation 2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
