Religious Binomials in Hebrew and Arabic: A Review of Literature

Abstract

Binomials (i.e., a collocation of two connected words belonging to the same word class, e.g., heaven and earth) are very frequent in every language. They are more commonly found in religious texts of Semitic languages. Compared to other types of collocations, religious binomials are sometimes idiomatic, alliterative, culture-specific, or adhere to one common word order.  However, compared to the dearth of studies on religious binomials in Hebrew, there is only one study on religious Arabic binomials used in a supplication. Studies on Hebrew focused on the constraints determining the order of binomial words, their semantic and grammatical categorization, how frequent they are, their functions, etc. Corpus-based studies on Semitic binomials were conducted for the purpose of proving that Semitic languages are similar.  Nevertheless, there are no studies that explored religious binomials in Arabic in relation to those used in Hebrew.  Thus, it might be insightful if future research on binomials focusses on religious ones in the Holy Qurʾān and Ḥadīth.