Biblical Phraseological Units in the Dictionary of I. N. Rednikov “Collection of Remarkable Sayings, Quotations, Proverbs, etc. from Various Times and Peoples with a Historical and Comparative Explanation” (Based on the Dictionaries by M. I. Mikhelson and V. I. Dal)

The article is devoted to the analysis of a little-studied aspect of the 19th-century Russian lexicography: the principles of selection and lexical development of biblical phraseological units in I. N. Rednikov's “Collection of Remarkable Sayings, Quotations, Proverbs, etc. from Various Times and Peoples with Historical and Comparative Explanations”.

The relevance of the study lies in the need to reconstruct the history of the formation of Russian phraseography and identify the role of biblical quotes in the development of the national corpus of aphorisms. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that I. N. Rednikov's “Collection”, which was first published in Vyatka in 1883 and reprinted in 1890, is considered not only as a translation and adaptation of a well-known work by the German philologist G. Buchmann, but also as an independent phenomenon that laid the foundations for a systematic description of biblical phraseological units.

The article pays special attention to the section “Quotes and Sayings from the Holy Scriptures”, which, along with ancient, Western European, and Russian sources, forms the universal structure of the publication. 

The article provides a comparative analysis with two fundamental lexicographic works from the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. The purpose of the study is to identify the principles of selecting biblical phraseological units in I. N. Rednikov's reference book and to compare the genre, structural, and methodological features with the dictionaries by M. I. Mikhelson and V. I. Dal.

The work shows that Dahl's dictionary is focused on the use of biblical expressions in the living vernacular language and is organized according to the alphabetical-nesting principle. Mikhelson's work is an academic thesaurus of catchphrases and allegories that combines historical and etymological commentary with a rich illustrative material for biblical idioms. Rednikov's collection was the first attempt in Russia to systematize biblical phraseological units based on a thematic-historical principle and to serve an educational and didactic purpose.