he purpose of this chapter is to help you get a better feel for the process of exegesis by providing illustrations of how certain parts of the process might work in various OT passages. A number of passages are used selectively here—in some instances more than one for a given exegesis step—in an effort to provide you with an exposure to the OT’s rich diversity of material. Therefore you will not see a systematic exeget-ical coverage of any single passage; for examples of the latter, recent technical and exegetical commentaries such as the Word Biblical Commentary series or the Hermeneia series (see 4.12.4) will prove helpful, as will, occasionally, the exegesis articles in a journal such as Interpretation (4.12.2).

Those who cannot read Hebrew will still find the content of this chapter helpful and generally comprehensible. For those who know Hebrew, regular reference to BHS (or BH³ or BHQ) is essential for a sense of the full contexts from which this chapter’s selections are taken.

For convenience, the divisions in this chapter correspond to those in chapter 1. Not every step should require an illustration, but wherever one might genuinely be helpful, at least one has been provided. Longer or multiple illustrations have been provided when it seemed that they might help to clarify the exegesis process.

There are two places to which you can turn immediately for help in confirming proper limits for a passage: (1) the Hebrew text itself in BHS (or

BH or BHQ), and (2) virtually any modern translation. Examine their paragraphing. In the case of the Hebrew text, the biblical material is set off in paragraph form by means of right-margin indentation variation. When the margin location changes, either by going further into the middle of the page or by going further back out to the right edge, that is signaling the editor’s opinion that logically a new section has begun. In the case of the modern English versions, simple indentation of the first word in a sentence indicates a new paragraph. By examining the arrangement of your passage, ideally in both Hebrew and English, you can quickly tell whether your own tentative identification of a passage conforms to scholars’ judgments about the natural groupings of subject matter.

Decisions about paragraphing are sometimes subjective, and you will find that the various editors’ groupings of content do not always agree. But if you decide to start your passage where no editor has begun a paragraph, or end your passage where no editor has ended a paragraph, then it is your responsibility to argue fully for your decision to select or configure the passage as you have done.

To analyze the contribution of the various ancient language versions of the OT for confirming or questioning the Hebrew text, you must in effect translate each one back into Hebrew at least to the extent that you can tell whether it reflects the MT or runs contrary to it. Since this process can be complicated, most people find it helpful, at least at first, to chart the versions one above another, line by line, so that your ability to compare readings is facilitated. Remember to compare the wording of the versions for the whole passage. If you try to consult the versions only when the MT seems problematic, you will miss all the variants resulting from MT corruptions that once were obvious but later were smoothed over and rewritten into readable Hebrew (but not necessarily the original Hebrew) by well-meaning scribes of old.

A word-by-word comparison in the case of 1 Samuel 20:32 (where the Qumran version happens to exist) would look something like the chart on the next page.

By writing out the Hebrew of the MT, then listing selected versions (including the LXX) directly underneath, according to the Semitic word order from right to left, you can easily see how the versions line up. In the chart, the parentheses are a convenient way to indicate that both the

Qumran text and the LXX omit any correspondence to the MT ליו), suggesting that this word might be an expansion (in this case, a simple explanatory addition) in the MT. However, the LXX also omits any correspondence to the MT and Qumran words אביו ויאמר. This perhaps reflects a haplography (a loss of something once present) in the Hebrew text that was used by the LXX translator. The Peshitta and Targum follow the MT, as they usually do. The Vulgate also follows the MT, as it typically does. (The Peshitta, Targum, and Vulgate are much less often truly “independent” witnesses to an original that differs from the MT than the LXX is. Even the Qumran scrolls, themselves Hebrew, will much more often reflect independence from the Hebrew MT than the Peshitta, Targum, or Vulgate will.)

In the chart we have included the English translation according to the Semitic word order. You may find it helpful to do this, at least as you begin learning the method. You may also wish to include the English translation under any spot where the versions contain a wording different from the MT, especially if you cannot translate the various versions at sight! Refer to Brotzman’s Old Testament Textual Criticism: A Practical Introduction or Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible or McCarter’s Textual Criticism: Recovering the Text of the Hebrew Bible (see 4.1.2) for examples and explanations of the principles involved in deciding which version best reflects the original.

Two examples are given here to illustrate the process of reconstructing and annotating the text. Many times a passage will require no reconstruction at all. After you have compared the versions, you will decide that the passage as printed in the BHS or BH³ or BHQ (all three contain the wording of the Leningrad Codex of AD 1008) adequately preserves the original. But when the ancient versions disagree significantly, you must try to determine how that disagreement might have arisen. Thus you must look for an original wording that would best account for the present divergent wordings. This means working backward from what is present in the various ancient versions to what theoretically must have been in the original text.

Hundreds of differences in translation among modern English versions of the OT are due simply to translators’ reconstructions of the Hebrew text. No modern translation follows the BHS/BH³/BHQ Hebrew text slavishly. All translators will modify a text whenever they think that the evidence from the ancient versions points to an original Hebrew text different from that preserved in the Leningrad Codex. As a result, they are often translating into English from a reconstructed Hebrew text. Thus, if for no other reason than to understand why modern translators have done what they have done, you need to know something about how reconstructing a text works. The examples below should help.

A careful comparison of the ancient versions confirms what the BHS textual footnotes 1a and 1b alert you to in abbreviated form. That is, the Hebrew (MT)

is possibly the result of a miscopy at some point in the long history of the transmission of the text ofJoshua. For the name כן( (Achan) you find that a number of important Septuagint (Greek) texts, as well as the Syriac Peshitta, have the equivalent of כר( (Achar), which is the form this name has in the Hebrew text as well at 1 Chronicles 2:7. Moreover, the name of this person’s grandfather, זבךי (Zabdi) in the Hebrew, is rendered in a number of important Septuagint texts as the equivalent of זמרי (Zimri), which is also the form the name has in 1 Chronicles 2:6.

Which is correct: Achan grandson of Zabdi or Achar grandson of Zimri? Three considerations help you decide. First, you take the approach that the Greek (LXX) evidence must be evaluated seriously. (See 4.1.3 for further comment on the value of the LXX relative to the MT.) It makes the choice at least a toss-up. In the instance of the first name, the addition of Syriac evidence adds even more weight. Second, you note that the comparative readings in Chronicles are very strong evidence for Achar and Zimri, respectively. Why? Because the Chronicler, writing long after the book of Joshua was complete, reflects an independent rendering of the names. We have no evidence to suggest that the Chronicler would alter a name, and plenty to suggest that his concern for accurate genealogies might preserve a name more precisely than even a copy of the book of Joshua would. Third, you see that the passage makes an issue of the mnemonic device, a pun, by which Israelites remembered the valley where Achan/Achar was stoned. They called it (Josh. 7:26) עמק עכור, “Trouble Valley,” the word for “trouble” pWk(, Achor) having the same consonants as Achar, but not those of Achan.

You must then give this evidence and your reasoning (whether briefly or at length depends on the scope of your paper/project) for the originality of Achar and Zimri, in annotations to the text as you print it out. Using the bracket system recommended in chapter 1, you may make your reconstructed text look something like this:

The superscript letters ^a and ^b will alert the reader to look for explanations of these reconstructions in your annotations.

A careful examination of the ancient versions reveals to you, however, that the Greek (LXX) at the same point in the verse has

Which was the original—“cattle” or “young men” or neither—and how do you decide? First, following the most basic principle of text criticism (as explained for you in any of the basic guides to text criticism listed in 4.1.2), you try to determine what original wording would, in the history of copying/miscopying the passage, have produced both “young men” in the Hebrew and “cattle” in the Greek. To do this you must translate the Greek back into Hebrew, because the original wording was not Greek but Hebrew. Here, by consulting Hatch and Redpath’s Concordance to the Sep-tuagint (see 4.4.2) or by using one of the computer concordances to trace Hebrew equivalents for Greek words (see 4.4.2) or by using Tov’s text comparison concordance (see 4.4.2) you can find at once that βουκάλια is how the LXX frequently translated the Hebrew בקר, “cattle.”

Now, just two more steps. First, you compare בחור and בקר. The words are the same except for the middle consonant, X or ק. The shureq vowel (W), though written with waw, is only a vowel and represents a vocalization decision by copyists long after 1 Samuel was first written (cf., e.g., Cross and Freedman, Early Hebrew Orthography [4.3.2]). What original word would account for both בחור and בקר? Your answer is בקר, “cattle.” The X of בחור is probably the miscopy. Second, you confirm this decision by analyzing the immediate context. After “male slaves” and “female slaves” (a logical pair), “young men” and “donkeys” would hardly go together. But “cattle” and “donkeys,” another logical pair, certainly would.

Finally, you summarize the evidence and your reasoning for your reader, at whatever length is appropriate to your paper. Your reconstructed text might look like this:

The ^a would refer the reader to your annotation, that is, your summary of the textual evidence and explanation, in the footnotes or endnotes.

To save space, the BHS (as did BH³ and as will BHQ) arranges poetry so that an entire couplet (bicolon) or triplet (tricolon) appears on one printed line. But in an exegesis paper, it is usually better to list each part of a couplet or triplet on a line of its own. In this way the correspondences from line to line are much more evident.

⁹כי־מראש צרים אראנו

ומגבעות אשולנו

הן־עם לבדד ישכן ובגוי□ לא יתחשב

From such an arrangement it is much easier to see that the couplet in verse 8 is a simple word-for-word synonymous parallelism, while the couplets in verse 9 represent more complicated synonymous parallelisms.

By the way, unless you actually intend to analyze the Masoretes’ medieval chanting system or count their (chanting) accents as a rough way of analyzing the meter of a poem (see the Masorah introductions by Kelley et al. or Ginsburg in 4.1.2 for help in doing this if it is what you wish to do), there is no point in including the accent marks in your own written text.

2.2. Translation

The purpose of the following illustrations is to encourage you to produce your own translation of a passage rather than simply relying on translations found in major modern versions. These brief examples all involve relatively simple Hebrew wordings, which nevertheless have not always been translated clearly or even properly.

What right have you to disagree with translations produced by “experts”? You have every right! Consider the facts: All the modern translations (and all the ancient ones for that matter) have been produced either by committees working against time deadlines or by individuals who cannot possibly know the whole Bible so well in the original that they produce flawless renderings at every point. Moreover, in the modern business of Bible publishing, the more “different” a translation is, the more risk there is that it will not sell. Thus there is a pressure on translators, committees, publishers, and others responsible to keep renderings conservative in meaning, even though, happily, usually up-to-date in idiomatic language. Finally, most people hate to go out on a limb with a translation in print. Many translation problems are matters of ambiguity: there is more than one way to construe the original. But space limitations do not permit translators to offer an explanation every time they might wish to render something from the original in a truly new way. So they almost always err on the side of caution. As a result, all modern translations tend, albeit with perfectly good intentions, to be overly “safe” and traditional. In the working of a translation committee, the lone genius is usually outvoted by the cautious majority.

Therefore, every so often you might actually produce a better translation than others have done because you can invest much more time exegeting your passage than the individuals or committees were able to afford because of the speed at which they were required to work. Besides, you are choosing a translation suitable for your particular reader(s) rather than for the whole English-speaking world. Remember: A word does not so much have an individual meaning as a range of meanings. Choosing from that range of meanings is often subjective and should be something you do for the benefit of your audience, rather than something you leave entirely to others who have no knowledge of your audience and must translate strictly for the masses. Fortunately, in an exegesis paper/project you can explain briefly to your reader, in the annotations to your translation, the options you had to choose from and your reason(s) for choosing the particular English word that you did. Those who worked on the various ancient or modern versions did not have such an opportunity.

The usual translation of the last part of the verse is something like this: “Proclaim against it because its evil has come up before me.” This translation, however, has always been problematic. It represents only one way of rendering some Hebrew words that have extensive ranges of meaning, and it does not fit easily the point of the overall story. After all, this is a command that Jonah tries to disobey by refusing to go to Nineveh. Yet as typically translated, it sounds like a command Jonah would love to obey. Why would he not be glad to preach against a city that God has declared to be evil—a city occupied by the enemies of his people?

In 1.2.1 you are advised to “start fresh, from the beginning.” Following that advice, and determined not to accept the usual translation as the only reasonable option just because it is the usual one, you consider the meaning of the Hebrew words afresh by looking at their definitions in a good up-to-date lexicon such as Holladay or Koehler-Baumgartner (4.8.1). Here is what you find: ל( can mean “against” but also “concerning.” כי can mean “because” but also “that.” ί!(Ί can mean “evil” but more commonly means “trouble.” And לה ... לפני( is best translated idiomatically not “come . . . before me” but “come . . . to my attention.” Eventually you conclude that the whole clause can very well mean “proclaim concerning it that their trouble has come to my attention.”

The exegetical implications are significant. In contrast to the usual translation, your translation makes it clear why the hypernationalist Jonah fled from his assignment: God was sending him on a mission of concern, not a mission of denunciation. A careful reading of the rest of the book confirms this repeatedly (cf. esp. Jonah 4).

This verse is usually translated about as follows: “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” But when you closely analyze the words’ meaning ranges, you find no Hebrew equivalent for the English “should.” This piques your interest. After all, the usual translation seems to promise quite a lot. Indeed, this rather popular verse has often been cited in support of the notion that parents can virtually guarantee that their children will turn out to be godly adults if raised properly. Most proverbs are of course generalizations, and generalizations have their exceptions. But you still have every right to “start fresh” in your own translation of this proverb, no matter how well known it may be. (Remember: The better known a wording in the Bible is, the more hesitant modern professional translators are to depart from it, even when they dislike it, for fear that people will not buy a Bible that has changed the wording of one of their “favorite verses.”)

The process of translating afresh is not terribly complicated. It requires mainly a willingness to consider combinations of meanings slowly and carefully. Thus with regard to Proverbs 22:6, what you can easily determine by patiently consulting a lexicon is that ל־פי( means “according to” and that דרך means simply “way,” so that דרכו means either “his way” or “his own way.” The first half of this poetic couplet actually says, then, “Train a child according to his (own) way.” You still find nothing about “should” here. The real point of the verse, you rightly conclude, is that a child who is allowed selfishly to do what the child wants when young will have the same selfish tendencies as an adult.

Note: Excellent sources of alternative translations are the authors’ translations in technical commentaries. A scholar who has studied a book intensively is usually best equipped to offer a nuanced translation. And for late-breaking information on more precise meanings of individual Hebrew words, check the annual listing of words discussed in such databases as Old Testament Abstracts (4.12.1), via either its book format or its computerized format.

2.3. Grammatical Data

Here is where all those hours spent learning your Hebrew grammar can finally pay off. The goal of grammar is accuracy. In any language, bad grammar may offend our tastes, but its greater danger is that it may block our comprehension. In the exegesis process, a failure to appreciate the grammar in an OT passage is not simply a failure to observe niceties of speech; it is a failure to be sure that you know exactly what was or was not said.

Exegeting Judges 19, you become aware of a puzzling apparent inconsistency. The Levite seems rather inconsiderate (v. 28) of what he has put his concubine through in giving her over to a gang of rapists (vv. 22-25), and yet later he seems so furious at what they (predictably) have done to her that he calls all Israel to war over the matter (vv. 29-30; chap. 20). Carefully, with an eye toward precise grammar, you reread the relevant portions to determine if your initial impression has been accurate. Your special interest is in understanding exactly who the parties involved in verse 25 were.

You note that each of the characters in the story is referred to in more than one way. Specifically, the Levite is referred to as אי# לוי (“Levite,” v. 1); אישה (“her husband,” v. 3); WntX (“his son-in-law,” vv. 5, 9); and האיש (“the man,” vv. 7, 9, 17, 22, 28, etc.). The Ephraimite man in whose house he stayed at Gibeah is called אי# זקן (“an old man,” v. 16); #האי (“the man,” vv. 16, 22, 23, 26); and האי# הזקן (“the old man,” vv. 17, 20, etc.). You see from a quick comparison that either the Levite or the old man can be referred to as simply #האי (the man). Who then is the actual

grammatical referent for #האי (the man) in verse 25? The concubine’s identity is rather clear, but #האי (the man) is apparently ambiguous. Deciding requires weighing the evidence on two fronts.

First, you observe that outside of verse 25, both the Levite and the old man may be called strictly #האי (the man) or may be called #האי (the man) with a modifier, as in האי# האלח (“the man who was traveling,” v. 17) or האיש ב)ל הבית (“the man who owned the house,” v. 22). Thus האיש (the man) in verse 25 is truly ambiguous. The lack of a modifier makes it so.

Second, you note that in verses 22-25 it is clearly established that the owner of the house was in conversation with the rapists, but there is no indication that the Levite was. You then decide, rightly, that #האי (the man) has as its grammatical referent the old man, not the Levite.

Grammatical analysis does have its limits. In the instance ofJudges 19, a separate question remains: Would not the Levite know what the old man had done? Grammar can lead to that question but cannot answer it. Its solution is found both in the analysis of the structure of the passage (a typically laconic biblical narrative, the passage omits all but essential details and expects you to realize that the Levite was unaware of the old man’s actions) and in the analysis of the historical context (as we know from archaeology, many Israelite houses had their living/sleeping quarters— where the Levite presumably was—in a back room, as far from the courtyard door as possible, so it would have been difficult for the guest to hear what was going on when the old man confronted the rapists).

לך קח־לך אשת זנונים וילדי זנונים בי־זנה תזנה האלץ מאחלי יהרה

Go, marry a woman of prostitution and have children of prostitution because the land is completely committing prostitution away from Yahweh.

Exegeting Hosea 1, you are immediately confronted with an interpre-tational question: Did God actually command Hosea to marry a prostitute? Many commentators have answered in the affirmative, often suggesting that Hosea’s wife probably turned to prostitution sometime after their marriage; and Hosea, looking back on his past at a later point when he was seeking an analogy for Israel’s unfaithfulness to Yahweh, recast the story of his marriage as if he had been commanded to marry a prostitute in the first place. However, these interpreters do not necessarily have Hebrew grammar on their side.

There are only three words for “prostitute” in Hebrew: il#Hp (cult prostitute), זנה (common prostitute), and כלב (male prostitute). You observe the obvious: None of the three is used here. Instead, a special compound term appears: The word h#) for “woman” or “wife” is used in what Hebrew grammarians call the “bound form” or, most commonly, the “construct form” in combination with a governing noun in the masculine plural, זנונים. Checking any Hebrew reference grammar (4.3.1), you are reminded that the masculine plural is one standard way in Hebrew for conveying abstraction—in this case, not “prostitute” but the concept “prostitution,” thus in theological contexts, the opposite of “faithfulness.” Moreover, you find that nouns in the “construct” are often related logically to their governing noun in the manner of “something characterized by,” so that ת זנונים#) would tend to mean “a woman characterized by [the abstract concept of] prostitution” rather than “a prostitute.” You also observe that Hosea’s children are called ילדי זנונים, “children of prostitution,” in a precisely parallel Hebrew construction: “children characterized by [the abstract concept of] prostitution” rather than “children of a prostitute.” You note as well that the verse goes on to say that the land (of Israel) זנה תזנה, “is completely committing prostitution.” Finally, the grammars tell you that the preposition employed at the end of the verse, מ(חרי, “away from,” is a compound preposition literally meaning “away from after,” thus here “in the other direction from going after [following]” Yahweh.

Thus the same thing is being said about Hosea’s wife, about the children that are eventually born to him, and about the land of Israel in gen-eral—and in no case is the literal meaning apparently related to actually selling sex. But what, then, is being said? If neither the wife nor the children nor the population of Israel are being called literally “prostitutes,” what is the charge against them? You must answer that question partly by reference to literary context and biblical context, though still with a keen eye to the Hebrew grammar involved. Looking at the way that the Hebrew root in question, znh (זנה), is used predominantly elsewhere in Hosea (and other prophetical contexts, notably Ezekiel), you find that it is employed mainly metaphorically, to convey the sense of “ultimate [religious] unfaithfulness” to Yahweh. Returning to Hosea 1:2, you conclude that the verse is conceptually parallel to Isaiah 64:6 or Psalm 14:2-3 (cf. Rom. 3:10-12). It makes the point, in a somewhat hyperbolic manner, that all Israel has abandoned Yahweh’s covenant, so that even Hosea’s wife and children—no matter whom he marries—will be tainted by the same unfaithfulness that “the land” in general displays.

As 1.3.2 states, the analysis of Hebrew orthography or morphology is not a task that beginning students can easily undertake. But its value is often inestimable in connection with problem passages, especially where the decisions of the medieval Masoretes about how words were to be understood may be suspect.

In the third line, the Hebrew seems to say “until Shiloh comes” or “until he comes to Shiloh.” Both meanings, you conclude, are odd, and your reading reveals a general dissatisfaction on the part of translators with the masoretic vocalization as it stands. In this case a convincing solution will require some ability to appreciate ancient Hebrew orthography (spelling style), which requires a knowledge of Hebrew beyond the beginner level (see 1.3.2).

The problem may involve vocalization, orthography, and even word division. The combination בי d( (until) seems clear enough. But is there another way to construe יבא #יל ה? Since ילה# (Shiloh) is the really odd factor here, you decide to try to reanalyze it. Removing the vowels will remove the medieval Masoretes’ possibly incorrect opinion as to vocalization. You now have ילה#. Can the word be divided? Could a spacing problem have resulted in ילה#? You divide י# from לה. Looking up י#, you find that its consonants are those of a normal Hebrew word (י#) meaning “gifts(s), present(s), tribute(s).” But what about לה? Referring to Cross and Freedman’s Early Hebrew Orthography (4.3.2), you learn that לה was how W ל (to him) was once spelled. Accordingly, ילה# could be ילה#, “tribute to him.” Now you look closely at יבא. Again, removing the masoretic accentuation so as to have a fresh look at vocalization, you get יבא . Cross and Freedman tell you that in early poems like Genesis 49, the original orthography was without vowels and thus quite ambiguous. So the consonants יבא could represent what was later vocalized as יבא (comes) or יביא (“brings,” hiphil) or יובא (“is brought,” hophal), and so on. The last option catches your attention, because it fits the context so well.

You conclude (with some well-justified second-guessing of the Masoretes, whose vocalizations, after all, represent only their opinions about how words were to be construed long after a passage was originally written) that the “Shiloh” line of the poem should read as follows:

The fact that this meaning comports perfectly with the following parallel line (“And the obedience of the nations is his”) confirms your conclusion.

A check of the relevant literature (step 2.12) provides welcome support: W. L. Moran proposed precisely this interpretation, by far the most convincing in the literature, in an article in Biblica 39 (1958): 405-25, titled “Genesis 49:10 and Its Use in Ezekiel 21:32.”

Some of the same sort of skill necessary to produce a conclusion may be necessary to evaluate a conclusion confidently. Even if it might never have occurred to you to reconstrue Genesis 49:10 as above, choosing among the options that have occurred to others still requires some careful work. Thus your exegetical effort will reward you as an evaluator of scholarship, not just as a creator of scholarship. In other words, as your exegetical skills develop, you become a better reader—not just a better writer—of exegetical studies.

2.4. Lexical Data

Considerable subjectivity is involved in deciding which words and phrases are the most important ones in a passage. That is one reason why this step comes here in the process rather than earlier. You need to be as familiar with your passage as possible before choosing and ranking terms for close study. Let your own curiosity and the knowledge level of your audience guide you. Where necessary, see which words the commentators select to comment on. But be careful here. A commentator who has dwelt on a word in chapter 5 of a commentary may not be inclined to belabor it again in chapter 10. Trust your judgment as to what is important. For the frequency of occurrence of a given word in the OT, you can consult almost any computer concordance, or, for example, Even-Shoshan’s concordance (4.4.2). For an idea of how much might be said about a term if one wanted to be relatively exhaustive in one’s analysis, see, for example, TDOT or TWOT (4.4.2).

Following the instructions in 1.4, you go through the chapter, picking out terms that you think might call for an explanation. At first you choose freely, without concern for how many terms you will end up with. These are the terms you select:

How many of these terms you want to or are able to discuss—and to some extent even which ones you will select initially—depends on the scope of your paper/project. You try to choose relatively few words for detailed analysis, realizing that terms needing no extensive discussion can be commented on in the translation notes or elsewhere in the exegesis. You choose five terms as requiring substantial discussion. They are the following:

Your reading has informed you that pi) probably means “military unit” rather than literally “1,000” here, and you need to explain the significance of this in your exegesis.

This unusual term, attested already in Numbers 18:19 and attested in concept although not exact wording in Leviticus 2:13 and Ezra 4:14, will certainly shed light on what Abijah thinks of the Davidic-lineage kingship.

Such a term is bound to be important for the understanding of polytheism/ idolatry from the orthodox Judean perspective.

Most translations render the word differently in verse 15 from verse 20. Understanding its usage can help to identify the divine role in the events described.

An understanding of this document would surely contribute to your appreciation of how the Chronicler compiled his history and the audience for whom he was writing.

From this group of five you decide to choose בריח מלח to analyze by a full word study. You must now follow the process described in 4.4.3 for both בריח (covenant) and מלח (salt). Referring also to the theological dictionaries (4.4.4) as well as the larger Bible dictionaries (IDB, ISBE, etc.; cf. 4.12.5), you learn that בריח מלח is a way of saying, in effect, “perpetual covenant” and perhaps even “perpetual royal covenant,” because of the role of salt as a preserver/perpetuator (cf. Lev. 2:13) and because of the association of salt with royal covenant meals (cf. Ezra 4:14). Indeed, the richness of this term occasioned a book by H. C. Trumbull titled The

Covenant of Salt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), which, if available to you, would certainly be worth consulting carefully in the process of your word study.

אביו	את שאול	1 Samuel 20:32 ויען יהונתן			MT
his father	Saul	Jonathan	And answered
זז	זז	[first two words obliterated]			Qumran
( )	τώ Σαουλ	ίωυαθαυ	καί απεκρίθη		LXX
זז	זז זז	זז	זז זז		Syriac
זז	זז זז	זז	זז זז		Targum
עשה	מה	יומת	למה	אליו	Vulgate ויאמר
has he done?	What	must he die?	Why	to him and said
זז	זז	זז	זז	( )	זז
πεποίηκευ; זז	τί זז	αποθυησκΕί; זז	"ίυα τί זז זז	( ) זז	( ) זז

verses 3, 17	אלף	thousand
3, 17	איש בחור	able-bodied soldier
4	הר צמלים	Mount Zemaraim
4	כל־ישיראל	all Israel
5	ממלכה	kingship
5	לעולם	forever
5	בדית מלח	covenant of salt
6	עבד שלמה	Solomon’s servant
7	רקים	worthless
7	בליעל	good-for-nothing
7	רך־לבב	indecisive
8	לאל הים	as gods
9	למלא ידו	to consecrate himself
9	לא אל הים	no gods
10	במלאכת	in the work
11	השל חן הטהור	the clean table
15	ויריעו	and they raised the cry
15, 20	נגף	routed/struck
18	אל הי אבותיהם	God of their fathers
19	(בית־אל) ואת־בנותיה	(Bethel) and its surrounding villages
22	מדרש הנביא עדו	commentary of the prophet Iddo

Chapter Two

Exegesis and the Original Text

2.2. Translation

2.3. Grammatical Data

2.4. Lexical Data