rin5tri innn. Targum of the Proverbs of - : Solomon, an edition with explanatory notes ; Isny, 1541. (Fiirst, 1. c.) 5. An epistle to Seb. Mun ster, published with Kimchi's Comment. on Amos; Basle, 1531. (See Wolfii iol ; Steinschneider, page 937.) 6. A translation of the Pontatemh into German has been attributed to Elias Levita, but Steinschneider mentions it as an opus snpposititinm (fatal. 942).
Our author's philological works, marked by a freshness and independence of judgment, as well as deep and accurate knowledge, which had been seldom, if ever, united in a Hebrew critic before, gave him a reputation which his name has sus tained ever since. The chief are I. n-onri Traditio traditionis, is an ela borate treatise on the criticism of the Hebrew Scriptures. Among the many interesting topics discussed in it, the question of the vowel points at tracted special notice, owing to the author's asser tion of their modern origin. He was the first (Bar tolacci, i. 141) to give prominence to the opinion which has since been adopted by most of the learned, whether British or foreign, that the Hebrew points were invented about 500 years after Christ, by the Masoretic doctors of the school of Tiberias, in order to indicate and fix the genuine pronuncia tion of the sacred language. R. Asaria de Rossi opposed him strenuously, maintaining the old belief that the vowel points, as well as the Hebrew letters, were known to Moses ; and Buxtorf in his Tiberias borrowed much from him, but modified his con clusions. The Latin translation by Seb. Munster,* of much of the niDnri ninn gave great currency to its opinions among the reformers and theologians of the 16th century. The controversy was sustained with great learning by such men as Capellus and Morinus on one side, and Calovius and the Buxtorfs on the other. (For a short sketch of the subject, and the modifications it has received from more recent scholars, see Havernick's Barad. to the O. T. [Clark] sec. 55, pp. 266-269.) 2. nvn Z1D.
(A title fancifully taken from ver. 66 of Ps. cxix.) [The book of] good judgment,' a treatise in eight sections on the Hebrew accents. An abridged trans lation in Latin was published in 1539 by Munster. 3. 1)112r1 The choice treatise, or the Has ter's treatise; a Hebrew Grammar drawn up for his pupils at Rome, and dedicated to Cardinal Egidio, 1518. It was shortly afterwards translated by Seb. Munster, under the title The Grammar.
Several editions were published of this work, and many adaptations, especially that of Jean Campange, Paris, 1539. 4. He was the author of other grammatical treatises, including Scholia' on the two works of R. Moses Kimchi [the Fetach.
Debara, and the llfahalach], and his 1716:4`, vnt, The chapters of Elias—dissertations, in which he analyses the structure of the Hebrew language from its letters upwards, through its verbal forms and relations, rhythmic laws, etc. (For an analysis, see Bartolocci, i. 138, 139.) 5. Our author was also an industrious and intelligent labourer in the field of Lexicography. His chief works under this
head are prAnp, i.e., Dictionary. In Wolfii Bibl. 'i. 157, 158, and Bartolacci, i. 137, the title given to this work is Lexicon Chaldaicum, Targumicum, Talmudicum et Rabbinicum ;' Isny, 1541. This work, which seems to have been less a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew than of the TaLgurns and the Talmud, was afterwards edited with the preface translated into Latin by Paul Fagius. Under the root twin, a collection of all the passages in which the Targumists had used the sacred word Messiah nvn, was carefully made ; this portion was separately published by G. Genebrard in a Latin version in the year 1572. 6. The treatise +mein, "Pishbite,' is a sort of sequel to Hebrew lexicons. It notices 712 Hebrew, Chaldee, Arabic, Greek, and Latin words which had escaped the notice of preceding compilers of dictionaries. In the quaint title we have a specimen of the author's humour in selecting a designation, Tishbi, which, while numerically composing the 7r 2 he has to in dicate, contains also an allusion to his name, Elijah or Elks (I Kings xvii. 1). Paul Fagius published a Latin translation of this work likewise, at Isny, 1541. A reprint at Berlin, 1833, by Moses Koer ner. 7. 0"In n11 7, Nomina rerun', a nomen • T clator of Hebrew words in Hebrew-German ; P. Fagius added a Latin version (Isny, 1542), and Drusius the elder a Greek vocabulary, which his son augmented, editing the work in alphabetical order, and arranged in columns, printed several times at Frankfort in the 17th century. 8. His valuable notes on the Liber Radicum of R. David Kimchi must not be omitted from this list ; 1:::,+;?;n) inLinrj glosses [or explanatory notes] on the book of [Hebrew] roots, etc.' Gesenius, in his preface to Biesenthal and Lebrecht's edition of this work (Berlin, 1847), says that it abounds in excellent explanations of Biblical words and passages—' hic liber permultas vocabulorum locorumque biblicor um explicationes continet his, qua nunc placere solent, prwferendas, atque dignissimas gum ab obli vione vindicentur.' R. Simon in his Ifistoire Critique du Vieux Test., c. xxxi. p 77, thus explains the characteristic of this learned Rabbi, which has inspired so great a con fidence in his writings On pent dire, que cet homme seul parmi les Juifs a ete capable de ne se laisser point preoccuper, et de ne point croire sim plement a l'autorite de ses Docteurs. II a examine les choses en elles-memes, et sans suivre les pre juges des autres Juifs, it a park des diverscs Lecons du Texte Hebreu, des points et des accents avec beaucaup de liberte . . . [and in p. 539 he sums up], En un mot, c'est celui de tons les Rabbins qui ait ete le mains superstitieux et qui merite le plus d'ętre lett.' (Besides the works of reference already mentioned, use has been made in this art. of Gabr. Groddeck's De Scriptaribus Rabbinicis [in D. Millii Catal. Rabbin.] and Neudecker's Elias Levita in Herzog's Real Eneycl.).—P. H.