I’d been meaning to talk with my friend at Hendrickson about Bernard Taylor’s Analytical Lexicon of the Septuagint (amazon.com) (ALS), but as fate would have it a different friend passed a copy along to me on Friday. So I figured I’d take a peek at it and blog a bit about it as well.

First, a disclaimer: I’m the one that put together the Lexham Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament, so I’ve mucked about the waters of analytical lexicons. Conceptually, analytical lexica like these are easy. Just dump the database and sort it, right? Realistically, they are much more difficult because they involve a tremendous amount of checking, sorting, reviewing, laying out, and other things. I understand completely how much work Bernard Taylor has done here, and he should be commended for the work.

Second, a story: When one of the editors of a text that Logos puts out (who will remain anonymous) came to the office to walk us through his work, we heaped adoration upon him for the years of work that was represented in what he’d done. He took this as an opportunity to tell us that all long-term database driven work really needs is “sitzfleisch” (dunno if I spelled that correctly), meaning someone’s gotta sit down and do it. For the LXX, Taylor sat down and did it. The world needs more Bernard Taylors.

Now, with all of that said, there’s really not that much to an analytical lexicon, presentation-wise. You should be able to look up your word (any word in the text) and get to a decent definition or gloss. Parsing is extra, and Taylor gives that too.

Taylor’s definitions are actually the translation equivalents from Lust, Eynikel and Hauspie’s Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (LEH), so they are recently published and have some history behind them.

The problem? The definitions are too brief. But more than that, there are no example citations listed at all. A lexicon of a corpus that has no references whatever to that corpus. No sample citations for senses. This is a problem.

Further, I have problems imagining anyone in this day and age of analyzed texts available electronically through numerous Bible software providers would actually use this lexicon in the way it seems intended to be used, by physically looking up the word in print. I could be wrong (or myopic, my gainful employment is in making these things available and accessible electronically) but I just don’t see it happening with any frequency. About the only reason to buy this book is to make sure you have an LXX lexicon on your shelf that you can look at when you can’t find the information anywhere else. And it is well-priced for that market (and could possibly steal the graduate student sales from LEH).

The problem is that I see another better presentation of the data. Instead of an analytical lexicon, this sort of data needs to be presented Sakae-Kubo style as a Reader’s Lexicon. Order it by the text, filter out words based on NT frequencies (since NT readers would be most likely to use such a work) and perhaps overall frequencies. Have volumes for Pentateuch, Prophets, etc. since they’re likely to be bigger than the present 600pp.

Of course, one further problem is that software providers are doing things similar to that. Logos has an “Exegetical Guide” which does pretty much that same thing.

So while overall I’m impressed with the amount of work and detail of the work that has gone into this volume, I have a hard time seeing how it could be used by anyone, outside of the use-case of simply needing an LXX lexicon on the shelf for reference. For that, the price is good — although one might be better off saving that money for an electronic version of an LXX Lexicon (LEH is available from several, including Logos).