Does "Bible Sense Lexicon" track with Louw-Nida Semantic Domains ?

I don't have the Louw-Nida "Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains". I'm considering getting it, but am wondering if the Logos "Bible Sense Lexicon" provides basically the same type of information as Louw-Nida. If so, I'm curious as to whether it's typically in agreement with Louw-Nida. And finally... if it does track well with Louw-Nida, I'm wondering if there are still significant reasons to have Louw-Nida?

If you have experience with both and would be willing to share, I'd appreciate your insights.

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Jeremy Thompson

Hi Rick:

I was one of the Hebrew curators of the Bible Sense Lexicon data. The Bible Sense Lexicon (BSL) and Louw-Nida (LN) are similar in that the lexicons are arranged by meaning rather than alphabetically. I would say that the BSL information should track well broadly with currently existing Greek and Hebrew lexicons.

That said, there are important differences between the BSL and LN. For example, the BSL covers content words in the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament, whereas LN only covers the New Testament. LN also covers grammatical function words in the New Testament (things like definite articles, prepositions, connectives, etc.), whereas the BSL does not. We considered that those are more appropriately dealt with in refrence grammars. The domain structures are little different: the BSL is more strictly a taxonomy, whereas LN includes different kinds of semantic domains.

So, I think there is good reason to have both. Otherwise, it might be a trade-off of whether having coverage of the Hebrew Bible is more important or coverage of grammatical function words in the New Testament.

John Kight

I think there is good reason to have both.

Agreed.[Y]

Rick Ausdahl

Hi Rick:

I was one of the Hebrew curators of the Bible Sense Lexicon data. The Bible Sense Lexicon (BSL) and Louw-Nida (LN) are similar in that the lexicons are arranged by meaning rather than alphabetically. I would say that the BSL information should track well broadly with currently existing Greek and Hebrew lexicons.

That said, there are important differences between the BSL and LN. For example, the BSL covers content words in the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament, whereas LN only covers the New Testament. LN also covers grammatical function words in the New Testament (things like definite articles, prepositions, connectives, etc.), whereas the BSL does not. We considered that those are more appropriately dealt with in refrence grammars. The domain structures are little different: the BSL is more strictly a taxonomy, whereas LN includes different kinds of semantic domains.

So, I think there is good reason to have both. Otherwise, it might be a trade-off of whether having coverage of the Hebrew Bible is more important or coverage of grammatical function words in the New Testament.

Jeremy, thank you very much!

I'd like to attempt a layman's paraphrase via bullet points. Please let me know if I'm on track--or at least facing in the right direction. [:)]

BSL covers both OT and NT whereas Louw-NIDA (here-after referred as LN) does not.
BSL is limited to nouns whereas LN covers all (or at least additional) parts of speech.
BSL does not address functional/grammatical relationships within the text whereas LN does.
BSL attempts to address the meaning/sense of a specific word in a specific context whereas in addition to that, LN attempts to group various words with similar meanings/senses based on the semantic domains the authors devised.

Did I completely butcher it? [:(]

Jeremy Thompson

Pretty close [:)]. The main correction would be that the BSL covers nouns, verbs, adjectives, and some adverbs, just not things like prepositions, articles, etc.

Rick Ausdahl

Pretty close . The main correction would be that the BSL covers nouns, verbs, adjectives, and some adverbs, just not things like prepositions, articles, etc.

Thanks for that clarification. Also please note that I added one bullet point to my previous post. Hopefully that doesn't muck it up.

Rick Ausdahl

Pretty close . The main correction would be that the BSL covers nouns, verbs, adjectives, and some adverbs, just not things like prepositions, articles, etc.

One last clarification. Do I understand correctly, that the sense/meaning BSL applies to the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. that it does cover, would generally line-up fairly close with LN?