Investigation into the origins of the rare compound δίψυχος and cognate forms has been dominated by intertextual methodologies. With a sole focus upon issues of literary dependency, previous scholarship has attempted to trace the neologism to a specific text or author. Such an approach is misguided, given the inherent methodological difficulties of establishing the direction of borrowing between texts of uncertain dates, as well as the tenuous historical record for the attestation of the lexeme. Moving away from intertextuality, in this article it is suggested that recent advances in the study of lexical formation, including translational compounding and prototype lexical semantics, present themselves as a more productive avenue of enquiry.

Interpreters have often struggled to account for the way in which the author of James employs the figure of Job as an example of ὑπομονή (Jas 5:11). Since a “steadfast” or “patient Job” is clearly incongruous with the book of Job, the Testament of Job is often forwarded as the preferred source of James’ Joban tradition. This article argues that James’ language of ὑπομονή should be read against its wider Greco-Roman literary background, and when done so, the Greek term emerges as an active, aggressive virtue, best rendered “enduring resistance.” The article posits that the author of James has reread the book of Job within this Greco-Roman literary framework, resulting in a congruent, though thoroughly Hellenistic, reading of Septua-gint Job in which the virtue of endurance takes on a newfound centrality.

Despite attempts to break the ‘Pauline fixation’ in Jamesian studies, scholarship continues to read James’ language of ‘faith’ and ‘works’ in relation to Paul. This article attempts to trace James’ language and soteriology back not to Paul, but to certain strands of thought within Second Temple Judaism. This problematises the view that James can only be understood by means of dependancy on Pauline categories. It also avoids falling prey to ecclesial biases that try to harmonise Paul and the Letter of James without due respect for each author’s differing soteriological emphases.

Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) continue to open up new lines of enquiry for lexicography, especially for research areas concerned with semantic categorisation. The aims of this paper fall into two parts. In the first half, the NLP tool Word2Vec is introduced and discussed with respect to unsupervised category formation for Koine Greek, using kinship terms as a demonstration of the model’s utility. The latter half of the paper employs a prototype theory framework to analyse the model’s distributional information in the construction of new dictionary entries for each kinship term. Such NLP-based research highlights the importance of encyclopaedic information for the construction of lexical entries; it also significantly improves upon earlier attempts at categorisation for Koine Greek (Louw and Nida 1988), which fall victim to using the L1 categories of the lexicographer in the construction of semantic domains for the ancient language.