“Thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.” On the Reception of the <em>Sefer ha-Shorashim</em> in Latin

This paper deals with the main chapters of the reception of David Kimchi's Sefer ha-shorashim within the Christian world during the Renaissance. A less known testimony of this interest, blending critical examination and appropriation is the integral Latin translation made by, or rather for, Cardinal Giles of Viterbo preserved in two mss., beside a rapid presentation of the situation of Hebrew lexicography in Latin at the beginning of the Renaissance and its deep change through the contested adoption of Kimchi’s model, a synthetic view of the various approaches to Kimchi’s dictionary, from simple adaptation to the rather complex moulding of a bilingual dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, to the paradoxical phenomenon of the translation of a monolingual lexicon in a different language. In the latter, the semantic loss is evident: what remains worth investigating is the expected exegetical gain for the Humanistic understanding of the Bible in an age of upheavals