"Only God knows the correct reading!" The role of Homer the Quran and the Bible in the rise of philology and grammar

This paper, written by a Hellenist with no direct competence in Semitic languages, attempts an elementary comparison between forms and meaning of the development of grammatical thought in three linguistic traditions: Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. Special attention is devoted to the role of the respective foundational texts (Homer, the Quran and the Bible) within (and behind) this process, especially as far as their philological reconstruction and the identitarian value of their language are concerned. As a result, it will emerge that some analogies link the early interplay between philological approach and description of language in the Greek and Arabic worlds, whereas the Hebrew tradition, because of historical and partly of ideological reasons, followed a rather different path.