Sefer ha-Meliṣa (Heb. The Book of Rhetoric) is one of the only two surviving Hebrew-Persian lexicons (the other was penned by Moses Shīrvānī). Comprising some eighteen thousand entries, it translates Hebrew words gathered from the Bible, Talmud, and midrashim  into Hebrew and comments on them in Persian (and occasionally in Turkish); it also translates numerous Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek words. The lexicon is of enduring importance to linguists because the words are translated into the old Persian dialect of Khwārizm, but it has not yet been critically studied. Because it…