Kitāb al-Uṣūl: The Book of Hebrew Roots, by Abū al-Walīd Marwān ibn Janāḥ (Rabbi Yonah). Edited by Blaise Webster and Marc Philip Boulos.
In eleventh-century Zaragoza, the physician and grammarian Abū al-Walīd Marwān ibn Janāḥ, Rabbi Yonah to the Hebrew tradition, wrote the first complete dictionary of the roots of biblical Hebrew. Writing in Arabic for readers who lived in Arabic, he took the triliteral root theory of his predecessor Yehudah Ḥayyūj and carried it through the whole Bible, root by root, from ʾalif to tāʾ, explaining each Hebrew word by its consonantal skeleton and by its Arabic cousins. The Kitāb al-Uṣūl became the foundation of Hebrew lexicography, and every dictionary of biblical Hebrew since has stood on it.
This volume gives Ibn Janāḥ’s work whole, in English, for the first time. The Judeo-Arabic text is printed as Adolf Neubauer published it in 1875, the only complete edition, with the English translation beside it on every page and Neubauer’s column numbers running through both, so that any passage can be checked against the edition and cited by it. The translation is literal, sentence by sentence. Where the printed text is doubtful, the notes say so and record what Ibn Tibbon’s twelfth-century Hebrew version read in its place. Hebrew and Arabic are set in their own scripts and transliterated by a single consonantal system, the Andalus method, which lets the two languages be read side by side as Ibn Janāḥ read them.
Three essays open the book: Marc Philip Boulos on the Andalusian memory that outlived 1492, Blaise Webster on why the study of biblical literature needs strict lexicography, and Andrea Bakas on the four consonants of the name Jonah, a paper offered in honor of Rabbi Yonah himself. An editorial note describes how the text was established and read against the page, and invites specialists in Judeo-Arabic to review the work. An appendix sets out the Andalus method and its transliteration.
OCABS Press, St. Paul, Minnesota. Large-format scholarly edition (A4, 1,042 pages).
ISBN 978-1-60191-107-0