Robert Estienne’s Alphabetum hebraicum & Alphabetum græcum

Robert Estienne’s most accomplished edition featured detailed comments on Hebrew reading, phonetics, and grammar, with application exercises including a retranslated Decalogue aimed at restoring the original Ten Commandments.

Robert Estienne, Alphabetum hebraicum, accuratiora omnia, 1554. Format: In 8°.

Robert Estienne was appointed typographer to the King for Latin and Hebrew in 1539; in the same year, he published a more complete Alphabetum Hebraicum than the previous one he had printed in 1528, using new Hebrew characters. For the rest of his life, he reprinted this work, revising and completing it each time. The booklet he published in Geneva in 1554 is without doubt his most accomplished. It begins with lengthy comments on how to read Hebrew, on the meaning of the letters whose Latin transcription he gives, a phonetic exposition and elements of grammar. Then come the application exercises, starting with a table of all existing syllables, in alphabetical order. The application text is the Decalogue, which he endeavors to reproduce in all editions, popularizing what Estienne had long begun to re-establish: the Ten Commandments had been distorted in Bibles since the Middle Ages, and it was he who retranslated them from Hebrew and rendered them in his successive editions.

Robert Estienne, Alphabetum græcum. Addita sunt Theodori Bezæ scholia, in quibus de germana græcæ linguæ pronuntiatione disseritur, Geneva, 1554. In 8°.

Based on the Alphabetum conceived by Estienne and already published in Paris in 1548 and 1550, the work is complemented by commentaries by Theodore de Bèze, Reformation theologian, professor of Greek and translator of the Bible into French, who succeeded Calvin in Geneva.It presents the three "king's Greek" fonts, as well as text models for reading practice and a history of the Greek alphabet.

Documents : Bibliothèque de Genève.