Riverwind

I have recently begun wondering how heavily to rely on Greek and Hebrew Lexicons. Someone calls one biased, while another calls another biased.

However, it seems that people are always looking for the newest, most "up-to-date" lexicon. Is this the correct thing to do, really, or should we be looking for the oldest extant lexicons? How have interpretations of various Greek/Hebrew words changed over time?

I guess these are some of the main things I'd like to explore... Does anyone know if there is a textual criticism of Greek/Hebrew lexicons? How does one go about finding the most ancient lexicons? Are there manuscripts of ancient lexicons?

I want to know more about words than a modern lexicon writer's/composer's biases may allow me to know.

Gamera

A language can never be reduced to a lexicon. Lexicons never provide the entire semantic field of a word. Moreover, every lexicon is argumentative: it makes choices as to disputed meaning, and possible meanings. Finally lexicons are inevitably circular: they derive semantic rules based on choices in interpreting texts which they then apply to those very texts to normalize the texts and rule out alternative readings.

There is no substitute for reviewing the text oneself and determining the possible meanings of passages in context.

Boro Nut

Not according to Superman.

Boro Nut

Roger Pearse

In that case, you need to use some means to examine the usage of a word in the texts, divine its meaning from context in each case, and work from that. This is what lexicon compilers do, of course.

The main risk with this undertaking is that, while a modern lexicon is peer-reviewed so can only express biases invisible to that peer-group, you and I are under no such constraints. In my experience it is my biases that blind me, rather more than other people's. They're the ones that I don't notice, you see.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Riverwind

Yet, that is my point exactly. One can't determine the meanings of words in a passage without knowing the other words in the passage, and one gets that knowledge from a modern lexicon or interlinear.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't know that I trust that the definitions of words have come down to us (ie. to modern lexicons) as they were "originally" defined.

How can I be sure? Does anyone know if there is a branch of textual criticism that deals with ancient lexicons/dictionaries. I wonder if anyone knows what the oldest existing lexicon MSS are, or what the oldest one is, or how one can get ahold of the text.

Riverwind

I understand, and I'm sure I have my own biases to bring to the table.

However, I guess I'm looking for some more technical answers/musings/etc. on the "transmission of definitions" over time. I would assume that the process would have been similar to that for textual criticism of the bible.

I want to learn from ancient/old lexicons how definitions have changed over time and if there are possible meanings that were lost or removed or modified over time for words.

Again, I guess I'm trying to learn if there is such a thing as textual criticism of lexicons or a study of the transmission of biblical/patristic/etc. lexicons.

Toto

I have wondered about this myself. How much nuance, slang, contemporary references are we missing?

But I don't think that the earliest lexicons would be more helpful. My understanding is that Koine Greek is actually a fairly recently reconstructed language, due to discoveries of papyri and in depth linguistic research. We know much more about the language of the NT than was known a few centuries ago.

Sources of KoineYou will find some discussions of "bad Greek" in the gospels, and what it signifies.

S.C.Carlson

Textual criticism is about determining the original wording of a literary work. I don't think it is quite the right word for what you are looking for. Perhaps, "source criticism" is more to the point.

It is true that lexicons often borrow from earlier ones. The introduction to the third edition of the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature (2000), the current scholarly standard, states that the one of the earliest Greek-Latin dictionary specifically designed for the Greek New Testament was a glossary printed in the 1522 Complutensian Polyglot. I'm sure that there have been earlier dictionaries designed for classical Greek, moreover.

The ultimate sources for a dictionary, however, are bilingual scholars proficient in Greek and at least one other language, especially those have translated works into Greek or from Greek. Latin was a particularly common language for translation, though many Greek works have also been translated into Syriac and other languages. Also, Greek is still a spoken language, though like any language it has changed over time, and some of these changes can be found in Greek-to-Greek dictionaries such as the Sudas. From these translations (not just of the NT) and intra-Greek source, the definitions of a sufficient number of Greek words can be reasonably known to bootstrap the process, with continual refinement of our initial understandings of the meanings of the various terms.

Stephen

Gamera

I believe the idea of a lexicon is a early modern development, and a particularly English one (since English had irregular orthography and grammar). There may have been lexicons in antiquity but I'm unaware of any. The concept would have probably been unthinkable. The purpose of lexicons was to normalize language, an idea that would have never occured to antiquity or Chaucer or Shakespeare. Note that orthography isn't an issue in most languages. Nobody would have a spelling bee in Germany for instance, since the orthography is phonetic, unlike English.

Only now, in our post-lexicon world, do we have any notions of orthography and normalized grammar.

S.C.Carlson

Medieval lexicons, or more properly glossaries, do exist for both Latin and Greek (mainly explaining hard or obscure words).