Polysemy and Homonymy in Biblical Hebrew

Abstract

In the analysis of Hebrew lexical items there is sometimes a tendency to interpret words exclusively based on their root meaning. In fact, the one-sided etymological analysis of Hebrew words is particularly tempting, because most Hebrew words are constructed around lexical roots consisting of two or three (sometimes four) consonants that are shared in common by a family of related words. Deriving the meaning of a lexical item exclusively from its root meaning while disregarding the phenomenon of semantic shift, which is frequently caused by metonymy, can lead to incorrect interpretations. Hebrew lexicons such as Brown–Driver–Briggs (BDB) sometimes contribute to this error due to interpreting words as polysemous lexical items when they should be interpreted as homonyms with non-related meanings.