In 2017, David Pleins and I released a new resource designed for students of biblical Hebrew: Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary by Conceptual Categories: A Student’s Guide to Nouns in the Old Testament, a user-friendly book from Zondervan that arranges biblical Hebrew words and phrases into categories from water to warfare, from jars to genitalia. Since then, we’ve gotten positive reviews in several journals, including the Review of Biblical and Early Christian Studies, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Expository Times, Bulletin for Biblical Research, Review of Biblical Literature, and Hebrew Higher Education. This blog series at theLAB aims to show how this book can be useful for students of all levels. (Links to previous posts will be at the bottom of this page.)
The last post in this series looked at how Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary by Conceptual Categories helps make sense of closely related vocabulary in Biblical Hebrew, using the example of words for various types of honey. However, the slight differences between closely related words in the Bible are not only related to their meaning. In this post, we will look at the possible evolution of Biblical Hebrew vocabulary over time.
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