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In this lexicon Tal Ilan collects all the information on names of Jews in lands east of Palestine, in which Aramaic and Arabic were spoken, and on the people who bore them between 330 BCE and 650 CE. The corpus includes names from literary as well as epigraphic source. Tal Ilan discusses the provenance of the names and explains them etymologically, given the many possible sources of influence for the names at that time. In addition she shows the division between the use of biblical and other foreign names, and points out the most popular names. This book is also a prosopography since Ilan analyzes the identity of the persons mentioned therein.The lexicon is accompanied by a lengthy and comprehensive introduction that scrutinizes the main trends in name giving current at the time. A large part of it is devoted to the question, how one can identify a Jew in a mostly non-Jewish society.

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