94 Christo H.J. van der Merwe used to denote an attribute of God. When this does happen, it provides a frame of God as warrior or One who enables His people to face hostile forces. * ** The notion “semantic potential” was used in this study to capture the activation potential for all the information (linguistic and encyclopaedic) connected with each of a set of semantically related lexical items in the Hebrew Bible, viz. ≈ma/≈yma, rbg/hrwbg, qzj/hqzj, lyj, jk, z[/zz[. Commencing with the “basic level items” of the set, describing the distribution, the prototypical use and accompanying contextual frames of each term, the following picture emerged: j'Ko and qzj/hqzj are the basic level terms for the conceptual category “strong/strength” in Biblical Hebrew. The prototypical reading of j'Ko appears to be: j'Ko denotes the ability — typically unmarked for quantity — which living beings may have various quantities of, and which they need to muster, to perform actions, prevail in, or endure situations that require the exertion or mustering of an effort/force. The term z[o does not co-occur with j'Ko. It occurs primarily in poetic sections and very often denotes an attribute of God, viz. to do powerful deeds in order to care for His people. It also often invokes the contextual frame: “God is a safe refuge”. The term z[' nearly always has the connotation of fierceness and/or destructiveness. It never denotes an attribute of God. hr:Wbg“/rbg is always marked for an abundant measure of strength, viz. “(very) powerful”. lyj' has various senses. The connotation with strength is mainly that of the I ability of able-bodied men to fight well (with skill) and often accompanies a degree of inner strength, i.e. bravery. ≈yMia'/≈ma often co-occurs with qzj and appear to be the more specialized of the two. It occurs predominantly in contextual frames of conflict. This is certainly not the last word on the meaning of the above-mentioned set of lexical items. I have not paid any systematic attention to the distribution of the lexical items in the diachronic layers of BH, nor to the contribution that comparative philological evidence can make towards a better understanding of any of these lexical items. More insights into the way(s) the speakers of BH conceptualized their world in general may also contribute to a refinement of the above-mentioned results. Questions that arose in the course of this investigation, and which I have not addressed are: Can a lexical item have more than one prototypical reading (e.g. j'Ko in 1a and 1b above), do prototypical readings always correlate with frequency of use, and what status should be assigned to a “prototypical” reading in a particular corpus (e.g. the books of Chronicles)? University of Stellenbosch Christo H.J VAN DER MERWE Private Bag X1 Matieland 7602