The semantics of Biblical language

James Barr

It is a main concern of both scholarship and theology that the Bible should be soundly and adequately interpreted. In recent years I have come to believe that one of the greatest dangers to such sound and adequate interpretation comes from the prevailing use of procedures which, while claiming to rest upon a knowledge of the Israelite and the Greek ways of thinking, constantly mishandle and distort the linguistic evidence of the Hebrew and Greek languages as they are used in the Bible. The fact that these procedures have never to my knowledge been collected, analyzed and criticized in detail was the chief stimulus to my undertaking of this task myself. - Preface.