In this lexicon Tal Ilan collects all the information on names of Jews in Palestine and the people who bore them between 330 BCE, a date which marks the Hellenistic conquest of Palestine, and 200 CE, the date usually assigned to the close of the mishnaic period, and the early Roman Empire. Thereby she includes names from literary sources as well as those found in epigraphic and papyrological documents. It is an onomasticon in as far as it is a collection of all the recorded names used by the Jews of Palestine in the above-mentioned period. 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 names and the use of Greek and other foreign names. She analyzes the identity of the persons and the choice of name and points out the most popular names at the time. The lexicon is accompanied by a lengthy and comprehensive introduction that scrutinizes the main trends in name giving current at the time. It provides immediate information on all known persons of Jewish extraction from Palestine during the Hellenistic and Early Roman Period.

Born 1956; 1991 PhD on Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; 2003-22 Professor for Jewish Studies at the Freie Universität, Berlin; 2022 retired; since 2008 she is the editor of the Feminist Commentary on the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud (FCBT).