The Lexical Field of the Substantives of “Gift” in Ancient Hebrew

This monograph exhaustively investigates the semantic domain of ‘gift’ in Ancient Hebrew, which comprises 28 substantives. The investigation firstly focuses on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations that determine the meanings of each individual lexeme and subsequently provides an overall picture of the developments and extensions of the whole lexical field across the different layers of Ancient Hebrew. The investigation sheds new light on the debated issue of the so-called sectarian Qumran writings, by demonstrating that they attest to distinctive patterns of lexical organisation that are not found elsewhere in Ancient Hebrew. The appendix finally discusses the feasibility of drawing concept related conclusions on the basis of linguistic data, thus sketching a possible map of the concept of ‘gift’.

Francesco Zanella, Ph.D. (2006) in Semantics of Ancient Hebrew, University of Florence, is research assistant at the Universities of Siegen and Bonn in the framework of the ThWQ Project (Theologisches Wörterbuch zu den Qumrantexten).

"Zanella consistently sets out his position clearly and creatively, and justifies it lucidly and persuasively. There is, ultimately, no doubt that Zanella has succeeded in what he set out to do -- to provide a set of objective, coherent and useful results concerning the lexical field of 'gift' in Ancient Hebrew, while acknowledging that those results must remain 'partial, relative, and connected to a specific semantic theory' (p. 61)." Marilyn Burton, University of Edinburgh in The Expository Times vol. 124, no. 12, September 2013, pp. 619-620.