11 PARONOMASIA OR WORDPLAY? a secret word for you”, since he immediately calls for silence. How- ever, the polysemous word rbd can also mean “thing”. The reader therefore suspects Ehud to have a secret weapon ― which is al- ready mentioned in verse 16 ― for Eglon. Indeed, with this weapon Ehud will kill the king of Moab, and his action is interpreted as God sending a messenger to save the Israelites from Moabite sup- pression. Besides Judg 3,12-30, a clear example of wordplay which contributes to the exegesis of a story can be found in Genesis 5,29. Here it is said that Lamech named his son Noah, because “out of the ground that the LORD has cursed this one shall bring relief from our work and from the toil of our hands” (NRSV). The wordplay be- tween the proper noun Noah (xn) and the verb Mxn (“to comfort, to bring relief ”) is obvious. Moreover, Noah’s characterization as comforter already foreshadows his future role in the story. Thus, the “play” with different aspects of words often has seri- ous purposes in mind ― far more frequently than it does humorous ones 28. Beyond any doubt, the literary context in which the He- brew wordplay manifests itself is very important in this respect. Moreover, this literary context is decisive in whether or not the am- biguity of word combinations comes to realization 29. Wordplay not only owes its existence to the literary context. Rather, the full mean- ing of a particular context can only be grasped when one succeeds in understanding the Hebrew wordplay. This makes clear that word- play and its inherent ambiguity will always be intimately related to its immediate and/or broader literary context. 2. A Play on both Sound and Meaning While almost every scholar explicitly states that ambiguity is an inherent characteristic of wordplay, the way in which this ambigu- ity takes form within a specific literary context is highly debated. In this contribution, wordplay is defined as a specific play and a reciprocal interaction between sound patterns brought up by the variation in morphological structures, on the one hand, and mean- 28 GLÜCK, Paronomasia in Biblical Literature, 78. Cf. also ALONSO SCHÖKEL, A Manual of Hebrew Poetics, 29. 29 Cf. H. VAN GORP – D. DELABASTITA – R. GHESQUIÈRE, Lexicon van li- teraire termen (Mechelen 82007) 26.