LEH - Lexicon of the LXX
Steven Craig Miller
scmiller at www.plantnet.com
Sun Nov 21 14:04:38 EST 1999
To: Clayton Stirling Bartholomew, Jim K. Aitken, et al.,
I hope this is not taken the wrong way, but some of your (plural)
statements concerning the weakness of LEH comes across as perhaps a little
"cold blooded." There are many of us who wish there were more (and better)
studies of the LXX, and that we had better lexical tools. But isn't there
also a place to be thankful for what little we have? After all, LEH is the
first real lexicon of the LXX (at least in English). Instead of comparing
LEH with BAGD (which had over fifty years of evolution), how about
comparing it to Cunliffe's Homeric lexicon?
CSB: << The main reason I bought LEH was to avoid using LSJ all the time
which is so big that finding words is time consuming. I tend to use
lexicons in stages. When reading the NT I start with a short one like
Danker's abridged BAGD and then if the situation seems to require it I move
on to
the longer and bigger lexicons and in real extreme cases to the theological
dictionaries like EDNT, TDNT, Spicq, Cremer, NIDNTT. >>
I too use lexicons in stages, except I start with the 1889 "Intermediate"
Liddell and Scott (which is based on [I think] the 7th edition of the
larger LS). I have a slight distrust of BAGD (or any NT lexicon) because I
feel that it/they tend to distort common Greek vocabulary towards a more
"religious" spin on the terms.
CSB: << It isn't going to be just handed to you all pre-digested like baby
food which is what we are used to when working with the NT lexical
reference works. >>
I once had a friend who chide me by suggesting that a lexicon is merely the
result of someone taking a concordance and doing all your thinking for you
(with the assumption that one would often be better off if one went to a
concordance first). I guess by nature I'm sort of the lazy type, I've never
been one to habitually go to a concordance first (not that I have much of a
choice when reading non-biblical Greek).
-Steven Craig Miller
Alton, Illinois (USA)
scmiller at www.plantnet.com
"... while steering clear of the Scylla of credulity one must be wary of
the Charybdis of undue skepticism" (Frederick W. Danker, "A Century of
Greco-Roman Philology," 146).
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