[B-Greek] It's good to be the King (was Semantic Range of Prepositions
Mark Lightman
lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 24 16:47:36 EDT 2010
Elizabeth wrote:
<Context is possibly the most commonly misunderstood
concept in biblical studies. The word context is used like
a magic incantation to invoked the goddess of the text
and/or culture who will sweep away all ambiguity.>
Hi, Elizabeth,
I suspect you are correct here. To speak of context is to say
really nothing at all. To say that Context is a
King is to say that no one is in charge. To give absolute
power to this "king of shreds and patches" is to allow the
text to become absolutely corrupted.
When it comes to the GNT, it may even be worse than
that. "We have met the King, and it is us."
Mark L
FWSFOROS MARKOS
--- On Wed, 3/24/10, Elizabeth Kline <kline_dekooning at earthlink.net> wrote:
From: Elizabeth Kline <kline_dekooning at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Semantic Range of Prepositions
To: "greek B-Greek" <B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 2:07 PM
On Mar 24, 2010, at 11:55 AM, Yancy Smith wrote:
> The effect of and on "context" (whatever that is, but I would guess it might
> include relevant pragmatics) is a whole 'nuther ball of wax, as we say in
> Texas.
Context is possibly the most commonly misunderstood concept in biblical studies. The word context is used like a magic incantation to invoked the goddess of the text and/or culture who will sweep away all ambiguity. It is used either with a cultural-situational referent or with a textual referent or both. The semantics of both cultural-situational and textual referents can be analyzed with some degree of success using semantic frames. I am not particularly up to date on this field. The idea has been around for ages. It wasn't new when Charles J. Fillmore wrote about it in the mid 1970s. You don't need to be a linguist to grasp the most useful part of frame analysis.
ὁ ποιῶν τοὺς ἀγγέλους αὐτοῦ πνεύματα καὶ τοὺς λειτουργοὺς αὐτοῦ πῦρ φλέγον
In Psalm 103:4 LXX PNEUMA and AGGELLOS are best render as wind and me
On Mar 24, 2010, at 8:30 AM, Iver Larsen wrote:
> The NETS of Psalm 103(4):4 reads: "He who makes spirits his messengers and flaming fire his servants." I have already said a lot about Heb 1:7 and this Psalm in earlier posts, so I won't repeat it here. Only to say that "spirits" here is better translated by "winds" ...
I agree with Iver because the Psalm uses a storm metaphor, and within the storm metaphor "wind" is an appropriate "instantiation" of a "slot" in the a semantic frame labeled "STORM". The storm metaphor is the semantic situation, the storm frame is a structured model of the situation which contains slots for features particular to that situation. When a particular slot is filled (i.e. not empty) that is referred to as "instantiation".
Theophanic Storms found in ANE texts have clouds, wind and lightening as regular features. Other more subtle features of Theophanic Storms would include the ability to inspire, fear, awe, worship, submission and so forth. Not all slots are filled in a give text. But the knowledge of the cultural linguistic expectations in regard to the situation represented by the Theophanic Storm can be stored in a frame for easy reference during translation work or exegesis. Searches can be performed on lexical items to see what sort of frames these lexical items are commonly used in. This has some similarity to semantic domains but the frame metaphor is also different in various ways from the approach used by Louw & Nida.
Elizabeth Kline
---
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