An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

3. I ate ice cream with my spoon.
In the first two sentences the preposition means ‘together wish,’ in one case
meaning ‘in the company of’ and in the other ‘in association with’; in the third
case it signifies ‘by means of.’ The same phenomenon occurs with other kinds of
grammatical entities. For example, Beekman and Callow have analyzed over
thirty meanings for the Greek genitive. 13
c A lexicon attempts to uncover a word’s polysemy by pointing out its possible
meanings in a language, while a grammar aims to reveal the polysemy of the
grammatical forms and patterns by citing their potential meanings. There is no
absolute separation between lexicon and grammar, and readers need to learn
where most efficiently to locate the kinds of information they need. Our grammar
focuses on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the following chapters offer a paradigm by
which the reader can test the possible meanings of a grammatical form in the same
way a lexicon enables the reader to survey various meanings of a word.
d While polysemy satisfies an elementary requirement of language, namely
economy, it exacts a price. Language may be ambiguous (i.e., an utterance may be
open to several interpretations), or equivocal (i.e., the listener may be forced to
hesitate over intended meanings), or even misunderstood (i.e., the listener may
come to a wrong conclusion about the speaker’s intended meaning). Even
utterances that the speaker regards as perfectly clear can be problematic, as each
of us knows from daily experience. Such utterances demand interpretation, the
process whereby the listener comes to know the speaker’s meaning. In everyday
life, interpretation often involves simply looking around at the environment, but as
the distance between speaker/writer and listener/reader increases, so does the
complexity of the interpretive process. At base, however, the interpretive process
always involves what Paul Ricoeur has called “sensitivity to context.” 14 Context
includes not only the linguistic environment of the actual words, but also the
speaker’s and the hearer’s behavior, the situation common to both, and finally the
horizon of reality surrounding the speech situation. Since we are writing a
grammar of literary texts, we are restricted in our knowledge of these broader
facets of context; our primary resort is to the formal features of language, though
we are obliged to bear in mind as much of the rest of the context as we can
reconstruct.
13
John Beekman and John Callow, Translating the Word of God (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 1974) 266.
14
See Reagan and Stewart, Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 125. The term “co-text” can
be used to indicate the literary environment in distinction from “context,” which
refers to the world environment; see C. Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction, and
Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) 4.