What's the Difference between 'Passover Lamb' and 'Passover Sacrifice' in Bible
I noticed in the Bible Sense Lexicon that there are two different sense entries for the animal sacrificed for the Passover: 'Passover Lamb' and 'Passover Sacrifice' (see below).
I can see that one entry is for the Greek and one is for the Hebrew, but why would that necessitate two separate entries? There are many sense entries that contain both Hebrew and Greek words, and you can search the entire bible for one sense regardless of testament or language?
Is there another difference in the sense here for the Passover animals that are sacrificed? They seem like the same thing to me. Exodus 12 says the animal is supposed to be a lamb anyway (either sheep or goat) so why the distinction between the Hebrew and Greek entries?
Comments
-
I noticed after posting this that even the Louw Nida sense (4.27) and the Factbook entry (Passover sacrifice) are the same for both entries. Curiouser and Curiouser.
0 -
You noted that the first shot above is limited to sheep while the lower one includes other land animals ...?
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
0 -
MJ. Smith said:
You noted that the first shot above is limited to sheep while the lower one includes other land animals ...?
But if the "lamb" can be a sheep or a goat per Exo. 12, and Merriam-Webster defines lamb as either: 1a: a young sheep or 1b: a young animal other than a sheep, are they really different to warrant two separate entries? Unless they were exclusively killing sheep and not goats for the Passover in NT times, whereas it could be either a sheep or a goat in OT times.
But more importantly, would a person searching for the sense of the Passover animal that is sacrificed and eaten during Passover care whether it was a sheep or some other animal being sacrificed? And is the biblical author making such and minute distinction in terms of sense?
0 -
Kiyah said:
But if the "lamb" can be a sheep or a goat per Exo. 12, and Merriam-Webster defines lamb as either: 1a: a young sheep or 1b: a young animal other than a sheep, are they really different to warrant two separate entries? Unless they were exclusively killing sheep and not goats for the Passover in NT times, whereas it could be either a sheep or a goat in OT times.
But more importantly, would a person searching for the sense of the Passover animal that is sacrificed and eaten during Passover care whether it was a sheep or some other animal being sacrificed? And is the biblical author making such and minute distinction in terms of sense?
All of which may be true but it doesn't matter. A person starting with sheep and working down the hierarchy would reasonably expect to find Paschal lamb. A person starting with animals that are herded/domesticated would expect to be able to work their way down to paschal lamb. A person starting at goat would expect to be able to work their way down to paschal lamb. The Bible sense lexicon works as a web (mathematical graph) showing that different sets of distinctions can bring you to synonyms or near synonyms. Whether it matters to the author is irrelevant. But yes, as a linguist, it matters to me that there are different distinctions that would matter to different people at different times - the sheepherder would make distinctions the bricklayer wouldn't; the priest would make a different set of distinctions. No farmer or cook I know would equate lamb (from sheep) with kid (from goat).
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
0 -
I think MJ's analysis is correct but I'm not sure it explains what is going on here
Both entries are in the same tree
and, interestingly, you can't go from goat down to Passover Sacrifice
My guess is that the NT and OT codings were done by different teams and they actually should be combined
0 -
Graham Criddle said:
My guess is that the NT and OT codings were done by different teams and they actually should be combined
I would expect the lexical relationships for Greek and Hebrew to differ - especially since they come from different language families and cultures so one would not expect a common conceptual framework.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
0 -
MJ. Smith said:Graham Criddle said:
My guess is that the NT and OT codings were done by different teams and they actually should be combined
I would expect the lexical relationships for Greek and Hebrew to differ - especially since they come from different language families and cultures so one would not expect a common conceptual framework.
And yet the sense lexicon very frequently has one entry for both the Hebrew and Greek terms of a sense. AND, it's the Passover, a common cultural observance for a people group celebrated down through the centuries.
On a separate note, I've also noticed that if you search for the lemmas pesach (Hebrew) and pascha (Greek) and go to those verses, many of them have no links to the Factbook. They are not tagged with either biblical thing (Passover Sacrifice) or cultural ontology (Passover). For example, if you go to the foundational Passover text (Exodus 12) to learn about the institution of the Passover, you will get precisely ZERO links to anything in the Factbook about Passover. I think the tagging needs to be more complete and consistent for such an important biblical concept.
This is probably not a new problem for Logos 9, but the changes to the Factbook are certainly highlighting more tagging and consistency issues, at least for me that's the case.
0 -
I don't know about feasts and such but Proper Nouns vs common nouns are frequently covered by different lexical coding rules.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
0 -
MJ. Smith said:Graham Criddle said:
My guess is that the NT and OT codings were done by different teams and they actually should be combined
I would expect the lexical relationships for Greek and Hebrew to differ - especially since they come from different language families and cultures so one would not expect a common conceptual framework.
Graham is correct about the history: we had two Hebrew curators and one Greek curator involved in the work (only one, Jeremy Thompson, still works for Faithlife).
MJ is somewhat correct: where Hebrew and Greek have distinct conceptualizations, we didn't force them together (for example, grasshopper is a kind of winged insect is a kind of "swarming thing", that last sense being a more Hebrew conceptualization). But one purpose of the BSL is to enable finding semantic information across the testaments, so we have combined senses across Hebrew and Greek when it seemed appropriate.
So our standard is "combine when appropriate", but because we had individual curators working on different sections (and more than 15k unique senses!), we sometimes inadvertently split things. I'd say this is an instance of that: the descriptions look like the same sense, just one from Hebrew and one from Greek. I'll pass this along to Jeremy for review.
> the changes to the Factbook are certainly highlighting more tagging and consistency issues
Absolutely, and that's a good thing! In particular, I feel the BSL hasn't previously gotten the exposure it should: Factbook improves that substantially.
0 -
Sean Boisen said:
But one purpose of the BSL is to enable finding semantic information across the testaments, so we have combined senses across Hebrew and Greek when it seemed appropriate.
So our standard is "combine when appropriate", but because we had individual curators working on different sections (and more than 15k unique senses!), we sometimes inadvertently split things. I'd say this is an instance of that: the descriptions look like the same sense, just one from Hebrew and one from Greek. I'll pass this along to Jeremy for review.
Thanks Sean! This was my understanding of the benefit of the BSL, to search across testaments.
Sean Boisen said:> the changes to the Factbook are certainly highlighting more tagging and consistency issues
Absolutely, and that's a good thing! In particular, I feel the BSL hasn't previously gotten the exposure it should: Factbook improves that substantially.
Indeed. Kudos to the team that worked on the new Factbook. I definitely use it tons more than I used to.
0 -
Kiyah said:
<snip/>
On a separate note, I've also noticed that if you search for the lemmas pesach (Hebrew) and pascha (Greek) and go to those verses, many of them have no links to the Factbook. They are not tagged with either biblical thing (Passover Sacrifice) or cultural ontology (Passover). For example, if you go to the foundational Passover text (Exodus 12) to learn about the institution of the Passover, you will get precisely ZERO links to anything in the Factbook about Passover. I think the tagging needs to be more complete and consistent for such an important biblical concept.This is probably not a new problem for Logos 9, but the changes to the Factbook are certainly highlighting more tagging and consistency issues, at least for me that's the case.
Elsewhere (e.g., Dt 16:2) these terms are aligned with Factbook on Passover Sacrifice so I suspect the Ex 12 references are just an error, but i've passed this along for review.
Note for the Cultural Ontology, we only aligned selectively, and at the level of verses, not words. The context (right-click) menu shows that Ex 12:3-11 is aligned with the cultural concept of Religious Feast (see image below). I'm not sure why that (rather than Passover) was chosen, but I'll check into it.
0 -
Sean Boisen said:
Elsewhere (e.g., Dt 16:2) these terms are aligned with Factbook on Passover Sacrifice so I suspect the Ex 12 references are just an error, but i've passed this along for review.
Thanks Sean. As I'm poking around it looks like they need to do a full review of all things Passover, including the New Testament references to pascha in the Gospels, Acts 12:4, 1 Cor 5:7, and Heb 11:28 in addition to the Exodus passage. There appear to be too many inconsistencies to report neatly, comparing Louw-Nida tagging, with BSL tagging, with Biblical Thing tagging, with Cultural Ontology/Concept tagging. But I'll leave it to the experts. I know there is a lot of judgment and ambiguity that goes with deciding what should get which tags and how that should link in the Factbook. Reviewing all things Passover might make a great case study though, it's such an important topic in scripture especially as it applies to Christ and the Gospel.
But thanks for responding. Good to know Faithlife is continually looking at all of these things.
0 -
Thanks Sean
Appreciate the comprehensive response and for following up
Graham
0
