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(More customer reviews)Word studies are some of the most abused pursuits in biblical hermeneutics. When we enter the realm of ancient tongues, too often we forget common sense. We create rules of language that we ourselves never follow in our own day-to-day speech. We overload words with deep meanings, whether or not the author intended it. We analyze the life out of scripture, obscuring the text itself.
Partially, this tendency is enabled by the rich arsenal of word-study tools at our disposal. Lexicons and concordances make it easy to look up every definition and instance of any word and its cognates. Computerized tools make this process painless even for the amateur scholar.
But this arsenal is full of double-edged swords. In this compact introduction to lexical semantics, Moises Silva presents to the exegete the knowledge to make use of these tools without drawing questionable conclusions. In particular, he highlights five common pitfalls:
1. reading into a word inapplicable meanings from related words (abuse of etymology)
2. reading into a word more than the word actually says (illegitimate totality transfer)
3. misunderstanding the role of context (neglect of syntagmatic considerations)
4. misunderstanding the role of synonyms (neglect of paradigmatic considerations)
5. confusing language and reality (confounding symbol, sense, and referent)
This is not an easy read. There's an awful lot of technical material packed into few pages, making the book quite dense. It is, however, an invaluable resource for the biblical exegete. One will want to give it several reads through, as well as refer to it from time to time as he cracks open his copy of BAGD or Louw and Nida.
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When first published in 1983, Biblical Words and Their Meaning broke new ground by introducing to students of the Bible the principles of linguistics, in particular, on lexical semantics -- that branch that focuses on the meaning of individual words. Silva's structural approach provides the interpreter with an important lexical tool for more responsible understanding of the biblical text and more effective use of standard exegetical resources. This revised edition includes a bibliographical essay by Silva, 'Recent Developments in Semantics,' and an appendix by Karen H. Jobes, 'Distinguishing the Meaning of Greek Verbs in the Semantic Domain for Worship,' that provides the reader with a substantive example of lexical study.
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