Meaning, Referent, and Matrix: Week 5

Read your Bible Better STUDY

When step back to consider what a word means, often times we discover that we have already assumed too much! Biblical hermeneutics slows us down to ask proper questions, not only about a word’s MEANING, but also about a word’s REFERENT. Most of the time, to make sense of the sentence, we have imagined already to the real-life representation of what each word is referring to.

REFERENT:

It is two different things to know the meaning of a word “cat” (an animal that has a tail and says meow) and the referent of “cat” (which particular cat in real life are we talking about or referring to?)

Consider the following:

And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.” (Matthew 27:47)

We know what the word bystander means: those standing near, and in this case, near enough to hear what Jesus said. But specifically to WHOM does this word refer? Is it the people walking by? Is it the soldiers? Is it the disciples? Each “referent” will give this passage a different flavor to what it means.