Toward a Contrastive Semantics of the Biblical Lexicon. The nouns of Rules and Regulations in Biblical Hebrew Historical-narrative Language and their Greek equivalents in the Septuagint.

The linguistic data presented in this work stem from a systematic corpus-based distributional analysis of the nouns related to the biblical notions of rules and regulations, drawn from within the historical-narrative language of Standard and Late Biblical Hebrew and organized as a lexical structure. This structure includes the nouns mišpāṭ, miṣwâ, tôrâ, ḥōq, and ḥuqqâ whose meanings, be it prototypical or peripheral, falls under the definition of statement (teaching, verdict, prescription, decree, order, commandment), which is issued in an authoritative manner (by parents, by a judge, a priest, a king, a military leader, God), and which implies a legal bond and a possible punishment for any shortcoming for the recipient. The scope of the investigation has been then widened in a contrastive interlinguistic perspective, by extending the analysis to the equivalent expressions in the ancient biblical Greek versions.