The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 1, Aleph.

• Author: Fitzmyer, Joseph A.

This is the first volume of a projected eight-volume dictionary devoted to all the known classical Hebrew texts from the emergence of the language down to about A.D. 200, the time of the codification of the Mishna. It thus includes all the biblical Hebrew writings, Ben Sira, published Qumran Hebrew texts, and Hebrew inscriptions of that period. It does not include the Mishna, rabbinic writings, medieval, or modern texts. It is a project that will grow with its publication - with more Qumran Hebrew texts as they are published, with the discovery of new inscriptions, and with the experience of the editors. By the appearance of the eighth volume, the first will probably need revision. Yet it is an innovative dictionary, which no one will regret having - and from which all will gradually profit, as they learn to use it properly. For it represents a modern, linguistically oriented lexical approach to the study of what the chief editor calls in the introduction "classical" Hebrew.

Volume one is devoted to aleph alone. 90 of its 475 pages are given over to the preface and an explanatory introduction, so that the remaining 385 pages deal with aleph. An estimate of 3,835 pages is given for the whole projected dictionary. The editors have already gone beyond their original estimate (372 pages) in this first volume, which gives some idea of the scope of this new lexical work.

The preface and the introduction stress the conception that has guided the production of this dictionary, designed according to "modern linguistics," with an emphasis "upon sentences as wholes, rather than individual words."

Although a dictionary must remain a word book and be organized alphabetically by the words it discusses, it must pay a great deal of attention to the contexts in which words occur, and the place they hold within the total system of the language. A modern dictionary, therefore, will concern itself not only with meanings, but with syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships. (p. 25)

Hence it seeks to show how a word is "used and in what kind of sentences and connections" and "how it is related in meaning and use to other similar or opposite words" (p. 25). This perspective makes this book an important contribution to the study of classical Hebrew, in that it rightly stresses the meaning of words in their patterns or idiomatic usages: what kinds of subjects and objects the Hebrew verbs have in the texts, and with what verbs and other nouns the Hebrew nouns...