If you search for the term ‘Comparative Hebrew Lexicography’ on Google, you will find—zero hits (apart, that is, from the present article, which has been there for the last few days). It is clearly a study that has never yet been attempted, as far as I know, in reference to lexica of Biblical Hebrew or Classical Hebrew. The term Comparative Hebrew Lexicography should be pretty clear. It would mean the systematic study of Hebrew lexica in comparison with one another. It would consist in its simplest form of identifying similarities and differences among lexica, such as their size and organization and treatment of cognates, and in a more critical form of evaluating the differences among lexica, making judgments about one lexicon over against another, or about commonalities among lexica that are open to criticism. My aim at this moment is to propose such a study, which seems to be a field ripe for development, and which, from my limited engagement with it over recent months, promises to become an interesting and truly critical new approach, subversive even of some long‐standing assumptions about dictionaries and of some well‐established scholarly practices. My scope here is strictly the ancient Hebrew language, which I call ‘Classical Hebrew’, and the lexica in European languages from the 16th century onwards (leaving aside the mediaeval and later dictionaries in Hebrew or in Hebrew and Arabic).
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 14:50:52 +0000
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