Review of Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary by Conceptual
Categories, by J. D. Pleins with J.Homrighausen (Zondervan)
This is an interesting attempt to organize nouns in the
Hebrew Bible by "conceptual categories." It provides noun lists organized into four
large categories: The Created Order, the Human Order, the Social Order, and the
Constructed Order. These categories are themselves divided into subcategories,
and the subcategories into sub-subcategories. So, e.g., under the Created Order
we are given Heavens and Earth; Metals, Stones, Gems, etc.; Colors; Time; Animals;
Flora. (Why not "Fauna; Flora"
or "Animals, Plants"?)
Note that almost all of the categories have to do with
realia and/or social relations. There is
no category including "Religion" or any of the terms for God, gods,
angels, demons, etc. For instance, the
word אלהים is not
found, and רוח appears
only in the categories of Wind and Upper Body (pp. 32, 66). (The latter is
glossed as "air" with a reference to Ex 15:8.)
The main purpose of the
book is, apparently, to facilitate memorization of the lists. This is explicitly recommended on p. 17. The philosophy behind this is "that an
ancient child did not need a dictionary to learn to read Hebrew and neither
should you" (p. 19). This glib
statement reduces facility in Hebrew reading to a rapid retrieval of all of its
vocabulary, no matter how rare, recondite, useless, or disputed. Such memorization tasks are of questionable
utility and in most cases will be a waste of time. If "an ancient Hebrew child" is the
benchmark, then the student should learn the same way as a child learns, by
being exposed to as much input (in the form of text) as possible, not by memorizing
context-free lists.
The book also falls into
the same traps as other attempts to organize cultures by their realia. One trap is that the categories used are
modern categories imposed on the lexicon.
For instance, the term יתום
orphan is found under "Human: General Terms"
(p. 62) and אלמנה
widow is found under "Family and Kinship:
Widowhood" (p. 93). However, these
terms are often found together in the Bible (30 times); they represent the most
helpless and vulnerable members of society, but neither term is found in the
category "Law and Covenant: Poor/Oppressed" (p. 102), where they
naturally belong. This distorts the indigenous
cultural categories.
The other trap is the
trap of polysemy. Students who memorize
the word מכרה under
the rubric "Disease, Mortality, and Disability: Medical Tools:
General" with the gloss "circumcision blade" (p. 71, with a
reference to Gen 49:5) will find it again (same gloss) on p. 99 under
"Worship/Cultic: Purity/Impurity: Circumcision" and yet again on p.
108 under the category "Professions and Occupations: Military: Weapons/Armor"
with the gloss "weapon, staff" (again with a reference to Gen
49:5). The ideal student who commits all
these lists to memory may not realize that this word occurs but once in the
entire Hebrew Bible, with a disputed meaning (Gen 49:5).
Another example is the
word צלע, which
occurs 4 times in the book, with the glosses "terrace" (p. 30),
"spine/rib" (p. 67), "side (of ark)" (p. 94), and
"side chamber, cell" (p. 128). The dutiful memorizer will accordingly
wind up memorizing 4 words with 4 different meanings, instead of one word with
several related senses. This is not
efficient or true to the nature of language.
Therefore I can't
recommend this book for its avowed purpose.
It is useful as a general organization of Hebrew realia into semantic
fields from a modern perspective, and from that standpoint it has its value. It
also has a good bibliography and a Scripture index, which magnifies its
utility. But as a pedagogical tool? No. The
best way of gaining facility in Hebrew reading is just to read as much Hebrew
as possible, seeing words in context, learning the words that come up again and
again. Memorizing a dictionary, however
it is organized, is not the way to go about it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. D. Pleins, with J. Homrighausen, Biblical
Hebrew Vocabulary by Conceptual Categories: A Student's Guide to Nouns in the
Old Testament (Zondervan, 2017).
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