Did Ancient Israelites Fall in Love? A Cross-Linguistic Semantic Approach to [inline-graphic 01]*

When the original readers read that Elkanah felt [inline-graphic 02] for Hannah, what kinds of concepts were activated in their minds? Many of the concepts would have been similar to the concepts we have today in the English phrase "Elkanah is in love with Hannah," but there would have also been other concepts that are foreign to our sensibilities, such as the insistent longing for the spouse's reciprocal love. The present paper seeks to reconstruct a definition of [inline-graphic 02] by drawing on bilingual studies and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. I first explain the shortcomings of approaches that take for granted that English emotion concepts are universal. Then I argue that it is possible to reconstruct the definition of [inline-graphic 02], if we make a deliberate attempt to avoid being drawn into our English conceptual world. Instead, we must emulate the structure of thought evident in the Hebrew text. Finally, after producing a definition for the "fall in love" sense of [inline-graphic 02], I show how the [inline-graphic 02] stories in the Hebrew Bible correspond with my definition.