Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 03:37, Peter Kirk wrote:
> 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.

I wonder if the ancient Hebrews used it as a catch-all term, since they
probably didn't have the finely-tuned categories (such as phylum) that
we have today, and perhaps that's what Gesenius' comment reflects?  I
don't know what he had in mind, but it does seem likely that BH didn't
split categorical hairs the way we do...


> 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.

Perhaps "water plants" is a good rendering for it in most references?  I
noticed the omission in BDB, but since I only rarely use that lexicon,
it didn't register too strongly.