Language about salvation: an analysis of part of the vocabulary of the Old Testament

It may seem odd that, after many centuries of translation and exegesis, the meaning of a common Old Testament Hebrew word like HOSIA can still be taken as the subject of a doctoral dissertation. There are several answers to this charge. First, there have, broadly speaking, been only two approaches to the problem of the meaning of HOSIA, the one based on simple translation (e.g. 'HOSIA means "save "), and the other on comparative philology (e.g. 'the root of HOSIA means "spaciousness". Cf. Arabic wasia "be spacious "'). Even without analysing the obvious inadequacy of these two methods, it is clear that there is still room for a systematic definition of the meaning of HOSIA from within the Hebrew language. How is it distinguished, for example, from HISSIL which also 'means "save", and from HIRHIB whose root also 'means "spaciousness "? Monolingual definition, in terms of meaning-relations contracted within the language, and semantic components identifiable in lexical groups, is, to the best of my knowledge, unknown in the field of Old Testament Hebrew lexicography.This leads to a second, more general answer. The gap between the semantics of Biblical language and modern linguistic theory has still to be bridged. My interests in this direction began in 1961 at New College, Edinburgh, under the stimulus of Professor James Barr whose famous book on the subject was published in that year, and were further encouraged by Professor Chaim Rabin in Jerusalem, whose course in semantica mictra'it at the Hebrew University in 1962, in a way marked the beginning of a new era for the semantics of the Hebrew language. More recently, my participation in the activities of the Linguistic Section of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne Philosophical Society, and some valuable assistance from Professor John Lyons in the University of Edinburgh, have made me aware of the immense contribution still to be made by general linguistics to Old Testament lexicography and interpretation.In this short essay I have tried to work out a general semantic theory applicable to a religious text like the Old Testament. In the field of Biblical research, semanticists - and this includes philologists, lexicographers, exegetes and theologians - have a distinct advantage over their colleagues in other branches of linguistic science in having a closed literary corpus to work with. Our first step is to define this corpus and the context or contexts in which it has meaning (Chapter I). There are varieties of language within the corpus and distinctions must be drawn in terms of style or literary form (Chapter II). A third chapter presents some of the more important historical factors operating in the associative field to which HOSIA , HISSIL, etc. belong; while the next chapter is a synchronic analysis of the meaning of these terms as they are used in a selected variety of Old Testament Hebrew, namely language addressed to God. The results of this analysis can then be correlated, compared with the historical data, and set forth as dictionary definitions (Chapter V). A final chapter attempts to draw up a modest blue -print for semantic studies of Old Testament terms, based on the experience of handling the lexical material involved in the foregoing chapters.This outline suggests a third answer to the charge that there can hardly be anything left to say on the meaning of HOSIA: a problem like this cannot properly be studied in isolation. Questions about the context of the Old Testament, the nature of religious language, and the relation between "word -studies" and "concept- studies ", on which there is still a great deal to be said, arise at every stage. Which words belong to language about salvation and which do not? What is the relation between "the meaning of HOSIA and "the meaning of salvation"? How is it possible to move from semantic analysis to Biblical Theology? What theological norms are there in cases of diversity of meaning? In short, there are theological and religious issues in this kind of study which point beyond the relatively circumscribed context of linguistic description