Traces

Everyone with a more than elementary understanding of how language works knows that words can have different meanings in different contexts. The more intriguing phenomenon, and one exploited by poets and novelists, is that a word can have a different meaning, or a very different referent in a new context, and yet also bring with it a trace of its meaning in a different text.

The Hebrew word for “ark” in Gen 6-9 is the same as the word for “basket” in Exodus 2:3. Though the word in both contexts has some sense of “boat,” the referents of the two uses are certainly not identical (ie, Noah’s boat is much larger). Yet, there is no doubt that the word in Exodus 2:3 is inflected by the use in Gen. The use in Exodus brings with it a whole set of connotations that the word did not have in Gen, precisely because of the use in Gen.