The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. IV.

• Author: FITZMYER, JOSEPH A.
• Position: Review

The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. IV: [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Edited by DAVID J. A. CLINES. Sheffield: SHEFFIELD ACADEMIC PRESS, 1998. Pp. 642. [pounds]75, $123.50.

With this fourth volume, the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew has reached its halfway mark, even though what has been published so far, from aleph to lamedh, does not quite cover the first half of the Hebrew alphabet. Some of the letters of the last half of the Hebrew alphabet will not require the same amount of space as the important letters covered so far. The editor's preface also explains that this fourth volume was expected to be the stoutest of the eight, because it has fourteen words that occur more than a thousand times: [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Every occurrence of them has been listed, save for [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], where general classes are provided.

See the review of vol. I in JAOS 116 (1996): 283-85 for a summary description of the editorial aims in compiling this new linguistically oriented lexicon of classical Hebrew; they continue to dominate the presentation of the words treated in this volume. The reader is assured that "no substantive changes have been made in this volume." Clines and his associates (executive editor John Elwolde; authors D. Stec, F. Gosling, A. Lee, R. Kossov, J. Harding, and J. Rogerson; and bibliographers K. D. Davis, A. Lee, and D. Bums) have again done a remarkable job in composing and typesetting this complicated volume. All the good things that were said of the first three volumes can only be repeated here.

The brief introduction calls attention to four aspects of the lexical work in this volume: (1) the difference of treatment between articles on nouns and articles on verbs that list the same noun with the same verb; (2) the organizing principle of recording subjects and objects of verbs; (3) the avoidance of terms like prophetess, Moabitess, shepherdess and the use instead of "prophet [fem.]"); and (4) the exhaustive treatment for all words, save the four noted above, which means that a high-frequency term like [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] which occurs over seven thousand times, is thus comprehensively covered.

As in the earlier volumes, the brief introduction is followed by "Sources' a new list of Qumran and Related Texts, which grows each time as...