Biesenthal and Lebrecht – Liber radicum, Sefer ha-shorashim

The most recent edition of Sefer ha-shorashim was published by Johann Heinrich Biesenthal and Fuerchtegott Lebrecht in Berlin in 1847. I shall henceforth refer to it as the BL edition. In a brief introduction to their work, the editors announce that they used the Naples edition from 1490 and three different manuscripts (p. 444) – a Spanish codex, a German codex (both of which then belonged to the Hebrew bibliographer Heimann J. Michael in Hamburg), and a third manuscript from the University Library in Jena (manuscriptum jenense quod ex illa bibliotheca summa cum liberalitate ad tempus mihi concessum est). Although Biesenthal and Lebrecht do not explicitly mention it, they also consulted early printings. Indeed, as I shall demonstrate below, their edition is mostly based on the second and third Venetian editions, that is the Bomberg revised edition (1546) and the Giustiniani edition, which also contains linguistics notes by Elijah Levita. Continuer la lecture de « A note on the Biesenthal and Lebrecht edition »

Présentation

Ce carnet de recherche accompagne le projet d'édition du « Sefer ha-shorashim » de David Qimḥi (c.1160 - c.1235), qui présente, dans l’ordre alphabétique, les racines permettant de regrouper commodément tous les mots de l’hébreu biblique. C'est un instrument indispensable à la compréhension du texte sacré, dans les communautés juives à l’époque médiévale, puis chez les humanistes chrétiens dès les prémices de la Renaissance.

David Qimḥi’s Sefer ha-Shorashim providing, in alphabetical order, the roots of all the words present in the Hebrew Bible, has rapidly become an indispensable tool for the understanding of the sacred text, in the Jewish communities during the Middle ages, and later for the Christians Hebraists from the early Renaissance onwards.