Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <cctr114 AT its.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Rolf Furuli wrote:-

>The problem, however, is not lexical but rather theological. The word
>prototokws taken in is plain meaning of "the one who is born first"
>strongly suggests a partitive genitive i Colossians 1:15, and this again
>places Jesus among the creatures - something  which is disgusting for those
>believing in the trinity. Therefore, systematic searches have been done to
>find another meaning of bekor/prototokws, and the meagre result (shown
>inthe lexicons) is Psalm 89:27 which adds nothing to the lexical meaning of
>the word.

How do you handle the situation where a word appears not to be used
in its lexical sense? Some examples from English. If our English
dictionaries define the word dog to to refer to the biological
family of furry creatures with four legs which has a proper latin
name which I don't know, and hot is defined as a high temperature,
then what of "hot dog". 

If you were standing in a fish and chip shop here and ordered a
hot dog you would get a sauage cooked in batter. In the US you
get one of their wieners in a bread roll. At one stage of my life
"hot dog" was a slang expression very similar in meaning to "cool"
today. The relationship between hot, dog, and any of these three
meanings is tenuous at best.

While bekor might have a single lexical meaning, the context in
which it is used may very well tell us that it is being used in
a metaphorical manner. It would seem to me that if I translated
the word using only its lexical meaning I would be obscuring the
meaning of the word in context for my reader.

I welome your comments.

Bill Rea, Information Technology Services, University of Canterbury  \_ 
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