Toward a Contrastive Semantics of the Biblical Lexicon

The nouns of Rules and Regulations in Biblical Hebrew Historical-narrative Language and their Greek equivalents in the Septuagint 
 
 by Romina  Vergari
 
Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2021
 

The linguistic data presented in this work stem from a corpus-based distributional analysis of the nouns relating to the biblical notions of rules and regulations (mišpaṭ, miṣwà, torà, ḥoq, and ḥuqqà) drawn from within the historical-narrative language of standard and late Biblical Hebrew. The aim of the research has been to investigate the meaning of these words within a lexicological model suitable to represent their semantic flexibility and variability, which is also reflected in their paradigmatic relations within the Hebrew lexicon.

The scope of the study has been then interlinguistically extended to the equivalent expressions in the ancient biblical Greek versions. To assess the degree of idiomaticity of the translators’ lexical choices and their possible interpretative implications, a further corpus of Greek historical-narrative texts broadly coeval with the biblical translations has been taken as a term of comparison; such a corpus has been created so as to include on the one hand writings transmitted within the Septuagint textual tradition and therefore exemplary of Graecophone Hellenistic Jewish culture, on the other hand texts whose origin and content are independent from this milieu.

Romina Vergari, Ph.D. is currently lecturer of Hebrew Language at the University of Florence. She has been postdoctoral researcher at the Universities of Haifa and Strasbourg. She has been visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (OCHJS). She is member of the editorial staff of the Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint (HTLS, Tübingen).