An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

linguae hehraicae (1506), as well as through his immense personal reputation. 32
The interest in scripture that mandated the study of Hebrew was new with
Reuchlin’s age and its concern for returning to ancient sources and reforming the
church.
c Although the Schoolmen of the High and Late Middle Ages did not believe that
scripture had one single simple meaning, as the Reformers did, some of them did
hold [Page 39] that its fundamental sense must be everywhere ascertained in
accordance with the principles of grammar and human discourse; only then could
other senses be considered. Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349) took special pains to insist
that all the senses presuppose the historical, grammatical sense as their
fundamentum and norm. Following Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141) and other
scholars of the Victorine school, Nicholas complained that the historical sense had
become much obscured because of the all too common practice of ignoring it in
favor of mystical exegesis. These Scholastics recaptured the thought of Augustine
and especially Jerome—who almost a thousand years earlier had studied Hebrew
with the rabbis in Israel—through the influence of the Jewish scholars, especially
Rashi. 33 Although the study of Hebrew was often neglected, it is an unwarranted
distortion to make Nicholas of Lyra a complete eccentric, out of place in the
Middle Ages. Beryl Smalley has criticized the view that Lyra was the first to
come under Jewish influence and was thus a proto-Reformer:
The Christian knowledge of rabbinics in the middle ages used to be underestimated.
Rashi was thought to have made his first appearance in Latin commentaries with
Nicholas of Lyre in the early fourteenth century. His influence on Lyre was classed
not as typically medieval, as indeed it was, but as a factor in the Reformation:
Si Lyra non lyrasset
Lutherus non saltasset.
[“If Lyra had not played.
Luther would not have danced.”]
This dicton absurde [“silly ditty”]…has been…disproved. 34
32 The title is given in various forms: Rudimenta linguae hebraicae (so, e.g., Tene,
“Literature,” 1360) and De Rudimentis Linguae Hebraicae (so Hall, “Biblical
Scholarship,” 44).
33 See the superb study of Herman Hailperin, Rashi and the Christian Scholars
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1963).
34 Beryl Smalley, Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1952; rpt. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1964) xvi.