Page:A Hebrew and English Lexicon (Brown-Driver-Briggs).djvu/12

 Berliner, and Merx, as well as the older publications. The Christian Aramaic of Palestine has been studied in the treatment of Schwally and Schulthess. In the Aramaic Appendix frequent references have been made not only to the grammars of Kautzsch and Dalman, but also to Krauss's Griechische u. Lateinische Lehnwörter im Talmud, and especially to the independent and valuable pamphlets of Scheftelowitz; Arisches im Alten Testament I and II. The Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus has been used in the primary editions of Schechter, of Neubauer and Cowley, of Schechter and Taylor, of E. N. Adler, G. Margoliouth, I. Lévi and Gaster, as well as in the more compact editions of Strack and Lévi, and the admirable facsimile issued by the Clarendon Press. Dillmann has been the main authority for Ethiopic, with resort, from time to time, to Prätorius and Charles. North-Semitic inscriptions have yielded their material through the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, the Répertoire d'Épigraphie Sémitique, the collections of de Vogüé, Euting, and others, and, especially in recent years, by the aid of the Handbooks of Lidzbarski and G. A. Cooke, and the Glossary of S. A. Cook. The important Aramaic texts from Egypt, of the fifth century which have been just published by Cowley and Sayce, have also been utilized for the Aramaic Lexicon. The lexical matter of Southern Arabia has been gathered from the Corpus, from the inscriptions published by Osiander, M. Levy, Halévy, Mordtmann, D. H. Müller (including the discoveries of Langer), Glaser, and others. Egyptian parallels have been adduced mainly from Wiedemann, Bondi, Erman, Steindorff and Spiegelberg, with occasional reference to Lepsius, Brugsch and Ebers. In all these departments, where active work is going on, fugitive materials have of course been found in many places, often scattered and sometimes remote.

It has been the purpose to recognize good textual emendations, but not to swell the list by conjectures which appeared to lack a sound basis. There is still much to do in textual criticism, and much which has been done since the printing of this Lexicon began would receive recognition if extensive revision were now possible. Among the critical discussion of the Hebrew texts which have been frequently used are those of Geiger, Graetz, Wellhausen (Samuel, Minor Prophets), Perles, Oort, Cornill (Ezekiel, Jeremiah), Beer (Job), Driver (Samuel), Burney (Kings), the several Parts of the Polychrome Bible, the Notes by translators in Kautzsch's Altes Testament, as well as those found in the Commentaries (especially the two recently completed series published under the editorship of Nowack and Marti, respectively, and the Old Testament volumes of the International Critical Commentary, edited by Professors Briggs and Driver), and in many periodicals.

As to the arrangement of the work, the Editors decided at an early stage of their preparations to follow the Thesaurus, and the principal dictionaries of other Semitic languages, in classifying words according to their stems, and not to adopt the purely alphabetical order which has been common in Hebrew dictionaries. The relation of Semitic derivatives to the stems is such as to make this method of grouping them an obvious demand from the scientific point of view. It is true that practical objections to it may be offered, but these do not appear convincing. One is that it compels the Editor to seem to decide, by placing each word under a given stem, some questions of etymology