Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jonathan Bailey <jonathan.bailey AT gmx.de>]

Well, Randall Buth didn't know about it, and others have written privately 
wanting to
know if I had found anything out about it, so i thought I would give a little 
review of "The
Practical Talmud Dictionary" that I had mentioned before.

First thing to know is that it is not a Hebrew or Hebrew/Aramaic dictionary, 
but rather
just an Aramaic dictionary for Gemara. It does have about 500 terms of Mishnah
Hebrew mixed into its entries, though. The only way that one can tell the 
difference
(other than through morphology) is that the Aramaic terms are translated into 
English
and modern Hebrew, while the Hebrew terms are only translated into English.

Second, the book is not an exhaustive vocabulary of Gemara. In fact, the book 
is a
slender single volume, and only has all words occurring 10 times or more, 
plus some
arbitrarily chosen words that the editor thought would be important.

Aside from these limitations, the book is excellent. It is very user 
friendly, and has the
words in the forms that they occur in the text, so one does not, in many 
cases, have
to guess the root. There are countless entries of rabbinical speech patterns
(Redewendungen) and idioms. This counts for the Hebrew as well.

Concerning Hebrew, it seems that the book is intended to supplement a modern
Hebrew dictionary. That is, one uses a modern Hebrew dictionary, but the 500 
entries
in the Talmud Dictionary are unique to Mishnah or have unique meanings in the
Mishnah, and there are a number of idiomatic phrases.

Concerning Aramaic, the dictionary intends to be a beginner's dictionary, and 
is very
user friendly, apparently explaining many halachic concepts, but it will not 
meet all the
needs of a long time student.




"If there are many wisemen in a city, this means that the city will soon 
fall."
Babylonian proverb

Jonathan Bailey
Hochschule für Jüdische Studien
Heidelberg
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Column/9707/index.html