An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

Arabic (like other languages) was a degenerate form of Hebrew, Schultens
maintained that Hebrew was only one Semitic dialect, while the purest and clearest
such dialect was Arabic…But in spite of the high value accorded to Arabic by
Schultens, his use of it was infelicitous and far from commendable even from the
point of view of an Arabist. He nevertheless marked the beginning of an epoch which
continued into the mid-20th century, in which one of the main forms of learned
linguistic study was the use of cognate languages for the elucidation of difficulties in
Hebrew. 42
c This new approach found further expression in N. W. Schröder (1721–1798) and
more substantially in Johann David Michaelis, professor of Oriental languages
and theology at Göttingen. The new approach also produced a new type of
Hebraist. Barr comments:
The academic Hebraist was now expected to be an Orientalist; this meant not only
knowledge of Arabic, but also an awareness of the new information brought by
travelers from the East about customs, the physical surroundings of life, and now—in
its first rudimentary form—archaeology. 43
d The grammarian whose work enjoyed the widest currency and influence both in
his own time and ever since is (Heinrich Friedrich) Wilhelm Gesenius (1786–
1842), professor at Halle. 44 His lexicon, Thesaurus linguae hebraicae (published
from 1829 to 1858), was successively revised and reached classic proportions in
the seventeenth edition, edited by Frants Buhl (1921); an earlier edition was used
as the basis for the English dictionary of Francis Brown, Samuel Rolles Driver,
and Charles A. Briggs (1907). Gesenius’s grammar, Hebräische Grammatik
(1813), went through many profound transformations. He produced thirteen
editions, his pupil E. Rödiger did the fourteenth through the twenty-first editions,
and Emil Kautzsch did the next seven. The latest English edition, by Arthur Ernest
Cowley (Oxford, 1910), is based on Kautzsch’s last edition. Later editors of
Gesenius’s work had to take into account the vast knowledge of ancient Near
Eastern languages and literatures being uncovered by the spade of indefatigable
archeologists and their decipherment and publication by brilliant linguists. None
of them, however, attempted to write a truly comparative-historical grammar.
Gesenius’s grammar, with numerous amendments and revisions and in various
editions, still remains a standard reference work today.
[Page 42] 2.5 Comparative-Historical Method (mid-19th to 20th centuries)
42 Barr, “Literature,” 1394–95.
43 Barr, “Literature,” 1395.
44 Barr, “Literature,” 1395–96. He was also the decipherer of Phoenician.