Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Nir cohen - Prof. Mat." <nir AT ccet.ufrn.br>]

to karl 

your etymology based on a process of “distillation” among peers and then
"elimination" is correct only in an average sense, and may lead you to errors
of interpretation when (for philosophical reasons) you presuppose a “unifying
element” between several items when one does not exist. you may be throwing
to the garbage relevant stuff when you eliminate the odds and seek common
denominators.

As in my response to rolf,  at issue is historical and contextual 
consideration about changes in etymology. 
In fact, most lexicographers give several options for a word, 
which may be quite Mutually Incompatible. 

Think of the English word “call” which may mean
“voice”, “to name”, “to address someone”, “destiny”, “guess” etc.
what would your "call" be in this case? clearly, some of these meanings are
just modern.

hebrew LXM is usually "bread" but at some points may be "meat"
or even "meal", as evident also in arabic.

back to the skies: HRQY(  in job, a very late book, may just not fit (both 
grammatically, Being a verb, and textually) with the use in gen 1, 
an early book. By positing “expansion” you find the common denominator 
of the two meanings, which is just a far shadow of each of them 
separately: “an (expandible?) surface” and “to rise to the skies”.

>>> karl: As a lexicographer of Biblical Hebrew, my method is as follows: 
I look up as many examples of a word’s uses as is practical, for words used 
about 30 times or fewer, I can have all occurrences of the term before me 
at the time. I then start a process of elimination….. etc

>>> karl: My opposition is the whole, not only the individual elements. The 
individual elements combine to make up the whole, that’s why we mention 
them. 

Nir cohen