Verbum Search through Tip of the Day #37a
Tip 37a: Factbook Biblical Person: Semantic Roles
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On Tip 19 we took a rabbit trail from Factbook through the Bible Word Study (Hebrew version). We now return to the Factbook entry. The Semantic Roles section of the Factbook entry for Abraham differs from the Bible Word Study Semantic Role section in that the former deals with occurrences for the person Abraham while the latter deals with a single lemma referring to Abraham.
Unfortunately, Verbum Help lacks documentation of the Semantic Roles section of Factbook. In addition, this section's behavior requires examination.
To illustrate the complexity:
There are four occurrences of Abraham as the agent in a single verse. If you make the reasonable assumption that the verb of a clause will be highlighted in blue and the “Abraham” agent will be highlighted in orange, you’ll discover that the highlighting is a bit confusing – all orange and no blue.
Unfortunately, there is no filter that shows the clauses that make up the verse. I find the quickest way to identify them is to run a clause search on the verse with the argument verb:ANY.
Note that the first 4 entries correspond to the 4 entries marked in the Semantic Roles section. Note that the verse contains one more semantic role for Abraham – that of theme which is defined as:
Theme — Something that is moved from one place to another or that is located in a place; for example, “David threw the spear (Theme).”[1]
One can also use agent:Abraham to verify that there are four occurrences of Abraham as agent in Gen 11:31.
By looking at the clause visualization we can deduce why all highlighting on these four items is orange. In all cases the pronoun is indicated by the form of the verb; the antecedent to that pronoun is then supplied by context (as captured in Faithlife tagging). This means that in the Hebrew, a single word provides both the subject (orange) and the verb (blue). The choice was made to give priority to the subject.
For more specifics on semantic roles, review Tip 34a.
[1] Jeremy Thompson, The Lexham Glossary of Semantic Roles (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014).
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