Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 26/01/2004 16:17, Dave Washburn wrote:

> My oldie-but-goodie Gesenius lexicon says "sea-weed, sedge, Jon. 2,6. 
> Hence YAM-SW.P, the sea of sedge, i.e. the Arabian Gulf or Red Sea,
> which abounds in seaweed..."  I've never been there so I can't verify
> this, but considering how long the lexicon has endured and how many
> others have been based on it, I would suspect that he did his homework. ...

Gesenius, or perhaps his translators into English, don't seem to have 
done their homework on botany; or else the meanings of the English words 
have changed since his time. Seaweed and sedge (in today's English) are 
totally different plants, not even in the same phylum, but this entry 
seems to suggest that they are more or less the same thing.

More than 100 years later Kohler and Baumgartner's translators could 
render no more precisely than "water plants" for the Jonah reference. 
BDB, by the way, omits the Jonah reference while claiming to be exhaustive.


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Peter Kirk
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