Some Notes on Lexicographic Criticism and Biblical Hebrew Studies. Revisiting David J. A. Clines's Method
What it is about
The full text is not in the library; this card rests on the abstract (from OpenAlex), and the ideas are provisional. The author reviews a series of papers in which D. J. A. Clines proposed "comparative (classical) Hebrew lexicography", the comparison of how dictionaries treat a word, and argues that his method suffers from chronological and linguistic biases that leave its findings inconclusive. She proposes instead a "lexicographic criticism" that reads each dictionary in its own time and language setting. Two case studies: the place of Aramaic in medieval dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew, and where the reading of חֵיל as "outer wall" (rampart) comes from.
Ideas
- I1. Every sense in the Torah dictionary should carry its source and date (BDB 1906, OSHB gloss, our own reading), so a sense inherited from an older dictionary can be traced and questioned rather than taken as fact; this is lexicographic criticism done in data.
- I2. When two sources disagree on a gloss, keep both with their sources instead of merging them, and count how often BDB's gloss and OSHB's differ over the Torah lemmas.
For Mova
Both ideas go to macula dict (the Torah dictionary's columns) and to The lexicon, where the dictionary's method is described. Neither needs the full text, but the case of חֵיל is outside the Torah.
Cite
@inproceedings{ortiz2024some,
title = {{Some Notes on Lexicographic Criticism and Biblical Hebrew Studies. Revisiting David J. A. Clines's Method}},
author = {Ortiz, Clara Carbonell},
booktitle = {Sefarad},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.3989/sefarad.024.1234},
url = {https://doi.org/10.3989/sefarad.024.1234}
}This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2024-ortiz-some-notes-lexicographic-criticism-biblical/