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Part I: Hebrew
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Mark S. Smith
Words and Their Worlds1
For Jonas, again (and again)
I.Introduction
In this essay, I offer my reflections on the study of words. My primary research does not lie in lexicography, but in textual commentary, literature and religion. Of course, words and their study are indispensable and foundational for all of these areas.
To locate my own experience and sensibility about words, I would say that my work in this area finds its greatest resonance with the encyclopedic knowledge and proven intuitions of my teacher, Jonas C. Greenfield2. I would say about myself, just as Greenfield himself wrote for a symposium on semantics also organized by this university two decades ago3, âI am not a theoretician, nor do I consider myself a trained linguist, but rather a philologist by training and inclinationâ4. I would also recommend the article from which this quote comes; it is indicative of an inductive approach with a laser-like precision that Greenfield used to attack the study of words. This is not to say that I have not found more thoughtful exercises about words helpful. At Yale, graduate students were introduced to the first edition of James Barrâs Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament5. I later encountered J. F. A. Sawyer, Semantics in Biblical Research6, as well as Arthur Gibsonâs Biblical Semantic Logic7 (itself no less sharp than Barr in its critique of philological practice). In the meantime, I have taken some interest in proposals for work on semantic domains, as found inter alia in John LĂŒbbeâs writings8. More recently, I have been mulling over the proposals of Ellen van Wolde in her impressive 2009 collection of essays, Reframing Biblical Studies: When Language and Text Meet Culture, Cognition, and Context9. As you will see, some concerns of mine that I mention below relate to what van Wolde expresses in her subtitle. Still, my focus falls on the practical side in asking what words mean in context. In his survey of European dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew in the twentieth century a decade ago, Michael Patrick OâConnor drew a distinction between âapplied or practical linguisticsâ and âtheoretical linguisticsâ as they bear on the lexicon10. Clearly I work in a âpracticalâ mode11.
There is a theoretical reason involved in my emphasis on the applied or practical. The use of modern linguistics concepts (such as word fields) by modern students of biblical (or ancient Hebrew) lexicography has been vitally important for the study of words, but at times it does not account for what we might call the ancient thinking about language or words. This is not to deny the tremendous value of the use of modern theory; it is only to ask that ancient understandings be included in our modern search for the meaning of ancient words. While it might be thought that the first task of lexicography is to capture the intuitions of ancient users about words and language, I find a good deal work in semantics of ancient Hebrew disengaged from its users and their specific linguistic and cultural contexts. Lexicography includes the ancientsâ operating assumptions. How did they think about words? West Semites did not write ancient treatises or modern dissertations, books or articles on the subject. Instead, what they thought about words is embedded in what they did with words. So that is where I begin.
II.Indigenous Information about Words
I do not wish to focus on any number of theoretical issues, such as the problem of defining the term, âwordâ or âwordsâ as such, much less the definition of roots12 or the problem of classifying words for lexicographical purposes according to their parts of speech13. However, I would mention the Levantine expression about words, as known from ancient lists, sometimes given in multiple languages. For example, under the influence of the Mesopotamian scribal tradition as practiced in northern Syria14, lexical lists from Ugarit have Sumerian, followed by comparands in Akkadian, Hurrian, and finally Ugaritic (in syllabic form); the lists include verbs, nouns, pronouns, prepositions and other particles15. So we can surmise that the ancient scribes engaged in âthe structural segregation of the unitsâ16 that would constitute available vocabulary. In other words, there was linguistic material recognized by scribes that would comport to the modern usage of the term, words. In short, we might say that such lists embed an early form of lexicographic delimitation with a comparative aspect. ...
