Lexical Meaning in Biblical Hebrew and Cognitive Semantics 95 SUMMARY This paper examines the contribution that a cognitive linguistic model of meaning can make towards the semantic analysis and description of Biblical Hebrew. It commences with a brief description of some of the basic insights provided by cognitive semantics. The notion “semantic potential” is used 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 prototypical reading of and relationship between these terms are then identified.