His research is philological/linguistic in nature, focusing on ancient Hebrew, and encompassing diachrony and linguistic periodisation; syntax, pragmatics, and the verbal system; the Tiberian written and reading and non-Tiberian Hebrew traditions; textual criticism and literary formation; and historical and contemporary exegesis. He serves on the editorial board of the series Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures. Bo Isaksson (PhD, Uppsala, 1987) is Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Uppsala University. His research has concerned Classical Hebrew in comparative perspective and Arabic dialectology. In recent years he has initiated two research projects on clause linking in Semitic languages which have generated a number of publications: Clause Combining in Semitic (Harrassowitz, 2015), Strategies of Clause Linking in Semitic Languages (Harrassowitz, 2014), Circumstantial Qualifiers in Semitic: The Case of Arabic and Hebrew (Harrassowitz, 2009). His present topic of research is clause linking and the linguistic reality behind the 'consecutive tenses' in Classical Hebrew. Elisheva Jeffay is an MA candidate at Bar-Ilan University, where she received her BA in Linguistics and French. Her research is linguistic, focusing on names in Biblical Hebrew from a syntactic xii New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew and semantic perspective. Her MA thesis will explore the syntactic position of gentilic and personal proper names, as well as their semantics and lexical composition.

This paper provides a new explanation for the insertion of *a in plural forms of *CVCC- nouns also formed with an external plural suffix, e.g. *ʕabd- : *ʕabad-ū- ‘servant(s)’, in various Semitic languages. This *CVCaC-ū- pattern is usually considered to be a remnant of the Proto-Semitic broken plural system in Northwest Semitic, but we show that it goes back to Proto-Semitic in this form. Internal evidence from Semitic as well as comparative evidence from Afroasiatic points towards a pre-Proto-Semitic plural suffix *-w- underlying the external plural suffixes. This suffix created a consonant cluster in the plural of *CVCC- nouns, triggering epenthesis of *a. As the prime example of broken plural formation in Northwest Semitic thus seems to be purely suffixal in origin, we conclude by briefly considering the implications for the history of nominal pluralization in Semitic.