Do Bashal and Hepsō really mean 'boil'? A preliminary study in the semantics of biblical Hebrew and Septuagint Greek

What it is about

A short lexical study asking whether the root בשׁל (piel/pual) means "boil" or simply "cook", and whether the Septuagint's ἕψω means the same. Of 29 food-preparation uses, about 10 have an explicit pot or liquid in context, 3 more probably imply boiling, and 12 give no clue; the qal and hiphil uses mean "ripen" and belong to another domain. The author weighs both readings (the explicit "in water" of Ex 12:9 suggests the verb alone does not entail liquid; the harmonising of Ex 12:9 with Deut 16:7 in 2 Chr 35:13 suggests readers took it as "boil") and concludes that "boil" is the default construal, with a generic "cook" possible in context, like German kochen. Greek ἕψω, with far more outside evidence, clearly means cooking in liquid.

Ideas

• I1. Dictionary senses split by stem: for בשׁל the Torah dictionary should list "ripen" under qal/hiphil and "boil, cook" under piel/pual, and pick the sense by the stem in the tree, not by one gloss per root.
• I2. Context-activated sense: when a "boil" verb has a sister or nearby argument naming water or a pot (בַּמַּיִם, סִיר), mark the gloss "boil"; otherwise give the default with "cook" as an alternative. A small rule over the trees, checked against JPS 1917 ("sodden", "boil", "seethe").
• I3. Count, over the Torah, each lemma's share of occurrences with an explicit instrument/medium argument, as a cheap measure of how much a verb's default meaning carries — a column for the dictionary.
• I4. Note the Ex 12:9 / Deut 16:7 tension as a worked example of lexical semantics in 10-lexicon.md (polysemy, default construal).

For Mova

I1 and I3 go to macula dict (the Torah dictionary: sense by binyan, frequency of context clues) and to The lexicon, polysemy section. I2 is a gloss rule for the dictionary's examples, measured against the JPS wording. I4 is a paragraph in 10-lexicon.md.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4102/hts.v78i1.7853

@article{mangum2022do,
  title = {{Do Bashal and Hepsō really mean 'boil'? A preliminary study in the semantics of biblical Hebrew and Septuagint Greek}},
  author = {Mangum, Douglas T.},
  journal = {HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.4102/hts.v78i1.7853},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v78i1.7853}
}

References

23 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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