Linguistics & Biblical Exegesis

Douglas Mangum, Josh Westbury

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781577997054
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

We rarely think about the way languages work because communicating in our native tongue comes so naturally to us. The Bible was written in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—languages no modern reader can claim to have a native understanding of. A better understanding of how language works should help us understand the Bible better as we seek to discern the original intent and meaning of each biblical author. In this book, you will get a basic introduction to the field of linguistics—its history, its key concepts, its major schools of thought, and how its insights can shed light on various problems in biblical Hebrew and Greek. Numerous examples illustrate linguistic concepts, and technical terminology is clearly defined. Learn how the study of language can enhance your Bible study.

1 Introduction to Linguistics and the Bible

Wendy Widder

1.1 Understanding Language

Everyone knows what language is, and many people have studied it formally at some point by learning the grammar of their native language or by learning another language. Through that study of language, many people likely became familiar with general concepts of language such as parts of speech, sentences, vocabulary, and the like. Fewer people know what linguistics is. Linguistics is the study of language as language—that is, how language works as a system.

In this volume, we introduce the field of linguistics and show how it can be used to understand the Bible better. Most of the Bible was written in two languages that the majority of modern readers do not know, and many of those who have studied biblical Hebrew and Greek likely have limited proficiency. A basic understanding of linguistics and how it applies to the Bible will help people better evaluate biblical interpretations based on language usage and reinforce even rudimentary language skills in Hebrew and Greek.

Language is remarkably simple and extraordinarily complex at the same time. Aside from those with physical or cognitive impairments, all humans speak at least one language fluently, and they did not have to work very hard to acquire their skill. Children learn to speak and use their native language simply by hearing it spoken. However, anyone who has tried to master another language, especially as an adult, realizes how complicated languages are. Learning an overwhelming list of vocabulary is the first step, followed by mastery of paradigms and learning to decode the syntax of full sentences and paragraphs. At every turn one encounters idiomatic language, connotations the dictionary does not include, and endless cultural elements that affect meaning. Learning vocabulary is the easy part.

One way to think about language is that it is the means by which we express thoughts or emotions. By this definition, language encompasses speech, text, and even body movement (e.g., sign language, gestures, or body language). It is a medium of communication. Another way to think about language is that it is a collection of meaningful sounds strung together in linear fashion to form words and then create sentences that will be vocalized by one person and understood by another—that is, language is speech. Speech becomes the basis for a written language. A third way to define language is that it is the specific communication system of a certain people group, such as the French, the English, or the deaf communities.

1.2 Understanding Linguistics

Language in all its nuances is the object of study for linguists. No linguist could reasonably explore every area of language, but “the field as a whole attempts to break down the broad questions about the nature of language and communication into smaller, more manageable questions”1 and then address these questions in scientific ways to reach reasonable, reproducible results. Linguistics is interested in language as language—that is, language as structured systems of human communication. In the process of studying patterns of language, linguists have discovered “that language is a system so organized that by learning a manageable set of elements and the rules for their combination, we can produce an indefinite variety of particular messages.”2

Linguists ask several questions of languages. First, they are interested in how a language encodes meaning. Meaning is a multifaceted concept that we will discuss more in chapter 2 (see “Semantics”). For now we can say that meaning encompasses more than words, though it very often does include words. Words have particular sounds and grammatical shapes, and they are arranged in certain orders and then fit into larger contexts. But meaning also involves the people engaged in communication. They have particular roles and motives, and they speak within the contexts of relationships and situations. Words, situations, gestures, intonation—all of these and more affect how we encode meaning when using language. When linguists study language systems, they want to understand how every part of the communication process contributes to meaning.

A second question that drives linguistic study involves the ambiguity that a language allows and the multiple, related meanings it permits a given word to have. For example, the English word “diamond” can refer to a geometric shape, and it can also refer to a baseball infield, which has the same shape. This phenomenon is known properly as “polysemy,” and it occurs cross-linguistically. For non-native speakers of a language, polysemous words cause endless difficulty, but native speakers have no trouble understanding and correctly using different senses of the same word (largely due to their greater familiarity with the socio-cultural context). Linguists are interested in how such related meanings develop and what the relationships between them are.

A third issue of interest to linguists is the significance of linguistic choices. In every language, there is more than one way to say what appears to be the same thing. For example, consider the following sentences:

Let’s have lunch at the café.

I want to have lunch with you at the café.

Do you want to go to the café for lunch?

You and I should have lunch at the café.

The café for lunch?

Each sentence expresses one person’s desire to have lunch with another person at the café, but each statement has a slightly different emphasis or nuance.

Some sentences can use almost all the same words but in a different order. Consider the following set of sentences:

I teach math to Jack once a week.

I teach Jack math once a week.

Once a week, I teach math to Jack.

I teach math once a week to Jack.

Once a week Jack is taught math by me.

Jack is taught math once a week by me.

This is not an exhaustive list of options, but it illustrates the versatility of language and the fact that every speaker makes linguistic choices. Linguists are interested in how these differences affect meaning and what motivates a speaker’s choice of one combination of words over another.

These are just three examples of questions that linguists want to answer when they study a language. Finding the answers helps them understand the structure of a language, and understanding the structure of language allows them to compare languages. When several languages can be compared and contrasted, linguists are able to formulate general principles of language.

1.3 Linguistic Analysis Explained

In this volume we are not solely concerned with linguistics, but with linguistic analysis of biblical texts; that is, analyzing a text according to linguistic principles in order to make decisions about the structure and meaning of the text’s language. The serious study of any text must begin with textual criticism, that is, determining the most authentic reading of a text based on an evaluation of the available textual variants. Linguistic analysis focuses on trying to understand the language of the text. If we misunderstand a language, we will also misunderstand a text. With respect to biblical study, this means analyzing the text in order to understand the Hebrew and Greek languages. Black summarizes the importance of linguistic analysis for biblical studies: “If the student of the [Bible] is to become something more than a well-trained technician, he must sooner or later develop a solid perspective on linguistic study and on the nature of language itself.”3

1.4 Studying the Biblical Languages

Biblical scholars have been studying language for nearly as long as there has been a text. Most of these studies fall more properly under philology, not linguistics—a distinction we address below and more extensively in chapter 5 (see “Comparative Philology”).

1.4.1 Philology: The Traditional Approach to Languages

Modern linguistics developed out of research on language from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but biblical scholarship did not incorporate its advances until the latter half of the twentieth century. Biblical scholars largely continued using traditional ways to study the languages. These traditional methods of study can be broadly categorized as philology, though scholars of biblical Hebrew and Greek understand “philology” differently.

The word “philology,” (philologia) meaning “love of learning and literature,”4 is commonly associated with the historical study of literary texts, specifically those in the classical languages (Latin and Greek). More specifically, the word is used to refer to the study of a language through the history of its usage and through languages related to it. This is the way it is used with respect to biblical Hebrew. Since biblical Hebrew and other classical languages have no native speakers, scholars are dependent on written texts, from which they have tried to determine how the languages developed over time.

Within biblical Hebrew study, philology involves trying to understand difficult aspects of the language through a careful reconstruction and categorization of words and grammatical structures. This is primarily accomplished through comparing related words and grammatical structures in cognate languages. Arabic was widely used as a comparative language for biblical Hebrew, mainly because of its long documented history and large vocabulary. Aramaic also provided a good point of comparison because of its similarity to Hebrew and its widespread use in the ancient Near East. As archaeologists discovered texts from other ancient Semitic languages, comparative studies grew to include languages such as Akkadian and Ugaritic. One of the purposes of philology was to identify the genetic relationships between languages so scholars could use data from one language to clarify features of related languages. For example, if English were a dead language...