After a five-year tenure, he retired and devoted himself to translation, dictionaries and the completion of his academic degrees, including a doctorate at Bar-Ilan University, where he researched fundamentalism in Egypt from 1973 to 1993.

[1] He became interested in Arabic literature when he was in high school in Iraq, encouraged by his teacher.

He started collecting words for the purpose of preparing a Hebrew-Arabic dictionary when he was a news editor for the Kol Yisrael radio, in the late 1950s.

After a process of updating and expansion that lasted over two decades, the dictionary was published by Schocken in 1990 in two volumes.

[2] In 2007, David Sagiv won the Landau Award for his comprehensive work in the field of linguistics.