Uses of Biblical Hebrew בְּ bə and מִן min in Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Samuel, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, and Esther

This is the data set accompanying Staps & Beukenhorst (in preparation), as well as chapter 2 of Staps (in preparation). It contains an analysis of the causal uses of the Biblical Hebrew prepositions בְּ bə and מִן min.

There is one file containing the data for the preposition בְּ be (be.csv), and one file containing the data for the preposition מִן min (min.csv). Both files are CSV files. The first line is a heading. Each subsequent line describes a single use of a preposition. Fields are separated by a comma character (','). When the field value contains a comma, it is enclosed by double quotation marks ('"').

The files contain the following fields:

Node: a reference to the word node of the preposition in the 2021 ETCBC/bhsa data set (Roorda et al. 2022). References are zero-indexed (and not one-indexed as in Text-Fabric).

Book, Chapter, Verse: together form the reference to the verse the preposition appears in.

PhraseAtom: the Hebrew text of the phrase_atom node containing the preposition. Phrase atoms are parts of larger phrases, but their boundaries are not terribly consistent. This column gives a rough indication of the phrase the preposition heads to make it easy to recognize instances without looking up a reference, but is not always equally helpful. (The only reason verbs are not listed is because they are harder to find.)

Jenni (only for בְּ bə): the category of the use of the preposition according to Jenni (1992).

Excluded: when non-empty, this column contains a reason for excluding the case from consideration. Either Jenni’s (1992) classification is not 16 (“beth causae”), 17 (“beth instrumenti”), 18 (“beth pretii”), or 19 (“beth communicationis”) (for the choice of these four categories, see §1.1 of the paper), or it concerns a compound preposition (e.g., bə-yaḏ ‘in the hand of’).

Causal: whether the argument marked by the preposition participates in the causal chain described by the clause. This makes a finer distinction in Jenni’s categories 16 through 19. A question mark indicates uncertainty or more than one possible reading. See the paper for details on the definition of causality.

Notes: gives a brief note how the instance is interpreted, to explain why it is excluded or how it supports the analysis in Staps & Beukenhorst (in preparation) and Staps (in preparation). For an explanation of the technical terms used here, refer to the paper.