[B-Greek] Greek, rather than English, glosses for Hebrew?

Trevor Peterson 06PETERSON at cua.edu
Wed Feb 18 12:03:28 EST 2004


>===== Original Message From Eric Weiss <papaweiss1 at yahoo.com> =====
>In other word, it appears, at least cursorily, that the semantic overlap 
between Greek and Hebrew words has more
>of a one-word
> to
> one-word correspondence than between Hebrew and English.

I would be careful about putting too much weight on this appearance. Part of 
what you may be observing is that we make the same attempt to avoid misleading 
English correspondences with both Greek and Hebrew. Think of it this way. 
Native speakers of English know English well--even if they don't speak 
"proper" English, they have an intuitive grasp of some very subtle nuances. 
With ancient Greek and Hebrew, on the other hand, we lack this kind of 
familiarity. Some of the problem is that most of us don't have the kind of 
fluency in any ancient language that we have in our native language. Some of 
it is that we simply lack the evidence to make these fine distinctions. So 
when we try to come up with correspondences between our native language and 
any ancient language, the tendency will be to lump English words together, 
since we are going from greater to less detail. This reflects our knowledge of 
ancient languages in general, but it should not be taken as evidence that the 
terms we are dealing with in those languages therefore correspond more closely 
with one another than they do with Modern English terms. We're simply looking 
through the same fog at both of them.

Having said that, I don't know that it would be all that harmful to learn 
correspondences between Greek and Hebrew words as part of building vocabulary. 
Particularly, it would be useful if you could find a general correspondence in 
the LXX, which if committed to memory, would strengthen your ability to 
evaluate the text of the OT by comparing the MT and the LXX. I would just 
caution, like anything else in learning basic vocabulary, that you take the 
glosses for what they're worth--useful handles, but little more than that.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics




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