| Author | James Barr |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Biblical studies, semantics |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Publication date | 1961 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 313 |
The Semantics of Biblical Language is a 1961 book by the Scottish biblical scholar James Barr, published by Oxford University Press. It was Barr's first book. Barr set out, in his own words, “to criticize certain methods in the handling of linguistic evidence in theological discussion.” He argued that theologians had built accounts of Hebrew and Greek thought on outdated ideas about language, and that the meaning of a biblical word is fixed by its use in sentences rather than by its etymology or its supposed root.
The book was received as a landmark. Ernest Nicholson and John Barton, in their British Academy memoir of Barr, call it a “landmark” contribution that “stopped in its tracks” the Biblical Theology Movement. Moisés Silva, Barr's student and the author of the standard successor study, called it “a trumpet blast against the monstrous regiment of shoddy linguistics” and “a major contribution to biblical studies.”
The Biblical Theology Movement, which flourished in the English-speaking world in the 1940s and 1950s, sought to bring out the unity of the Bible by setting biblical thought against non-biblical thought. Its writers argued that a special Hebrew world view lay encoded in the distinctive features of the Hebrew language, and they drew a strong contrast between Hebrew thought and Greek thought. A favourite method was the word study, in which individual Greek words in the New Testament were examined to show that their content was in reality Hebraic, and scrutiny of a word's etymology was treated as a source of illumination of its essential meaning.
Barr held that the movement's understanding of language derived ultimately from Idealism and took little account of modern linguistics as it had developed from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. His book surveyed the linguistic methods then in use, concentrating on the use of etymologies and on the method of Gerhard Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.
A central target was the claim that Hebrew and Greek impose distinct and incompatible modes of thought on their speakers. Jan Joosten notes that this idea, a particular application of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, had been argued in detail in Thorleif Boman's Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek. Barr attacked the reasoning that moved from grammatical phenomena to patterns of thought, as in Boman's claim that Hebrew is a more dynamic language than Greek because the Hebrew verb “always expresses a movement or activity.” Fritsch reports Barr's reply that many Hebrew verbs are stative and intransitive and express no action, and that Greek also has a strongly represented aspect system for its verbs. Joosten judges that Barr's critique “was on the whole well founded” and that Boman's case “was indefensible.”
Barr argued that etymology is a statement about a word's history and not about its meaning in a given context. Fritsch summarised this part of the book by saying that Barr gave “several shocking examples of how etymologies are improperly used as guides to the semantic value of words in their current usage,” and that “the knowledge of the etymology of a word is no infallible guide to its present meaning.” Carsten Ziegert describes two of the errors Barr named. The “root fallacy” treats the consonantal root of a Hebrew word as first-hand evidence for the word's meaning, although the root is only an abstraction. “Illegitimate totality transfer” reads the whole range of a word's possible meanings into a single occurrence, although the context determines which particular meaning is to be chosen. Barr gave the error its classic statement at page 218 of the book, where he wrote that “any one instance of a word will not bear all the meanings possible for that word.”
Barr's longest criticism fell on Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, which occupies pages 206 to 262 of the book. He held that the dictionary confused words with concepts. Silva states the objection in this form: a dictionary is supposed to offer word substitutions, whereas the TDNT contains essays on the history of ideas, and if its purpose is to investigate theological thought, there is no reason to organise that investigation under words. Fritsch reports Barr's conclusion that the dictionary tends to become “a series of theological essays on the doctrines associated at certain points with certain words.” In Barr's related terms, “illegitimate identity transfer” identifies the semantic value of a word with the value of other words used for the same concept, and “illegitimate totality transfer” treats a word's cumulative usage as determining its meaning in a particular instance.
Against these methods Barr set the sentence. The meaning of words is indicated primarily by their context in sentences and by their contrast with other words, and Hebrew as a system of communication functioned in the same way as other languages. Fritsch quotes Barr's positive claim that “the real communication of religious and theological patterns is by the larger word-combinations and not by the lexical units or words.” Ziegert likewise summarises Barr's rule in the form that theology is not to be obtained from words but from propositions.
The book brought Barr instant international recognition, and it also provoked controversy and among some critics a degree of hostility. R. McL. Wilson, reviewing it in New Testament Studies, called it “an important book, raising questions which ought to be considered and exposing faults and fallacies which ought to be exposed.” Brevard S. Childs, in the Journal of Biblical Literature, described Barr as attempting for the first time to bring the methods of linguistic semantics to bear on biblical scholarship in a thoroughly consistent manner.
Other early reviewers accepted much of the criticism while judging that Barr had overstated his case. Fritsch wrote that Barr's strong warnings against pure etymologizing should be heeded by all biblical scholars, but he felt that Barr had overstated the case against etymology and again in his treatment of the TDNT. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, writing on the English TDNT in Theological Studies, judged that Barr's criticism “merits serious consideration” and advised frequent users of the dictionary to ponder it as a caution, while noting that the criticism was merited in some cases and not in others. Barr was often asked why he had not supplied a new method alongside the criticism. His answer, recorded in the memoir, was that no new method was needed: “What was necessary, as I saw it, was not a new method, but a correction of aberrations which had crept unnoticed into existing method.”
Within a few years of publication, the memoir records, dominant features of the Biblical Theology Movement were dissolving. Emphasis on the unity of the Bible gave way to interest in its diversity, and the popularity of word studies had greatly waned. Silva's Biblical Words and Their Meaning (1983) took Barr's book as its starting point, opening with a chapter on Barr and lexical semantics. D. A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies later built a catalogue of word-study errors on Barr's categories, listing illegitimate totality transfer as the unwarranted adoption of an expanded semantic field.
Fifty years after publication, Joosten wrote that reading the book “remains a salutary experience,” while warning that Barr's is not the last word and that the relation between language and thought remains open to investigation. Ziegert's survey of two hundred years of biblical semantics divides the field into three phases and treats Barr as the scholar who made linguistic structuralism predominant among biblical scholars from the 1960s. On Ziegert's reading, structuralism still dominates the field, but cognitive linguistics now offers a new paradigm that Barr's own approach did not supply.