I have set out to analyse the various ways in which the concepts of number and counting are conveyed in the Pentateuch, and am having trouble making sense (pun intended :-) ) of some of the ways these are represented in the Bible Sense Lexicon.
For example - on opening the lexicon and entering "first" in the search box, I'm presented with the following list of senses and their glosses:
I find it hard to understand why the three highlighted senses are separated. Sense 15 only gives Greek lemmas, while "first day" is a very common sense in the Hebrew Bible.
I have analysed some of the data I was able to export to Excel and then import into Access - here is a screenshot of a sample query
Staying with "first" for a moment - #'s 1, 92, 103, 472, 473, and and 475 all have the phrase "first day", but none are tagged with the sense "first day" - rather, first (series), first (highest), and first (beginning) are used.
# 479 shows another anomaly: the ordinal number twenty-first is conveyed in the text by inflections of the hebrew numerals one and twenty, which is reflected in the senses allocated: one (single), twenty. However, the sense twenty-first (order) is not given.
The dash for sense in #480 shows that the record was returned from a search for the string "first" in the ESV, and that no Hebrew data was returned as directly applicable to the substring first.
As time goes on, I'm finding more "messiness" in the sense lexicon in this area of number.
Does anyone have any comments or suggestions?
Peter Whan
