# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1855_S133
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastors’ Library. 133

The work of all the important lexicographers before the author of this work has been used by him with great diligence and critical precision. A Chaldean-Rabbinic dictionary of 134 pages and a Latin index, by means of which one can find the Hebrew word corresponding to the Latin one,*) are appended. The Clavis proper comprises 1,198 pages in large octavo. It would indeed be foolish to deny that the research of, for example, a Gesenius offers not a little for Hebrew lexicography that serves partly to supplement and partly to correct Stock’s work; but we must declare it an even greater folly to suppose that one can safely use and rely upon a work of thorough linguistic research even by a rationalist, without having to fear that here too one will be misled both linguistically and substantively. Even a Winer—although himself a rationalist, yet one of the more honest ones, proud of his impartiality, and a man with too great a love for linguistic study knowingly to help distort the laws of language for the sake of a shallow rationalism to be imported into the Bible—even a Winer writes concerning the period beginning with the rise of rationalism: “Precisely herein lies the chief fault of our ordinary biblical philology: Hebrew and New Testament language were not conceived as living idioms intended for communication among human beings. Had this been done, had people everywhere asked themselves whether the departures from the prevailing laws of language that they assumed in the Bible on such an enormous scale were compatible with the purpose of a human language in practical life, they would not so arbitrarily have regarded everything as permissible and taken pleasure in attributing to the apostles, in almost every verse, an enallage or an exchange of what is correct for what is incorrect. If one reads certain more recent commentaries that are still current today (for the older ones are almost free of such perverse practices),**) one must infer that the truly characteristic feature of New Testament language is its lack of all precision and regularity. For everywhere the interpreters demonstrate how there is a false tense here, a false case there, the comparative here instead of the positive, ὁ there instead of τις, now but instead of for, now therefore instead of because, now beyond instead of on this side (what instead of thus, Isaiah 8:20); and faced with such learning on the interpreter’s part, one becomes thoroughly indignant at the ineptitude of the holy authors, who so ve-

*) Fischer’s edition does not have this often very useful index. Indeed, Fischer did not altogether “improve” Stock’s works in Stock’s own spirit, although certain merits cannot be denied to his editions. Characteristic of Fischer is the admission he makes in the preface to the Clavis: that the unclassical style of the old theological works first made theology distasteful to him and aroused disgust for it, and that only Buddeus’s elegant style reconciled him to this field of study again.

**) Winer’s own words. D. R.