Sense: lawyer
n. — a professional person authorized to practice law; especially expected to have significant rhetorical abilities.
Five days later the high priest Ananias went down to Caesarea with some of the elders and a lawyer (ῥήτωρ) named Tertullus, and they brought their charges against Paul before the governor.
Acts 24:21 (NIV)
Today’s example sense is a rare word that occurs only once in the entire New Testament. One thing that we need to do in order to understand rare words is to understand the broader background. Here it is necessary to understand a broader legal background, which the Bible Sense Lexicon allows us to by grouping different kinds of people concerned with the law under the concept “legal person”:
For example, with a bit of clicking we find that legal concepts like “accuser” occur just before and after this verse mentioning a “lawyer.” In fact, the accusers are the ones making use of a lawyer in Acts 24:10, so perhaps by looking at the other uses of “accuser” in Acts 23:30, 35 and Acts 25:16, 18 we might better understand the role of the lawyer in this text. We might also consider looking at the roles of others, such as “judges” for which we find the sense annotated in Acts 24:10.
What is the Bible Sense Lexicon?
Sense of the Day is based on content from Logos’ Bible Sense Lexicon, which organizes biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words by meaning based on a variety of semantic relationships. Sense of the Day provides examples of senses in context, along with insight into their application for theology and interpretation.
The Bible Sense Lexicon is a Logos dataset available in Logos 5 Gold and higher base packages. If you’re enrolled in the Logos Academic Discount Program, you can also find the Bible Sense Lexicon in the Biblical Languages base package. Take your studies even further by exploring semantic domains, engaging the biblical text like never before.
Learn more about the Bible Sense Lexicon.