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I see more and more journal articles on New Testament interpretation preferring to use the Louw-Nida Greek Lexicon that is based on "semantic domains". An example from the introductory essay of a 2016 book Paul and Gnosis edited by Stanley E. Porter and David I. Yoon:
Stanley E. Porter begins the first section on Paul and knowledge in general,
setting the stage for the rest of the volume by conducting a lexical study of
knowledge-words in the Pauline corpus (which includes the disputed letters
of Paul). While most confine their studies of knowledge-words in Paul to the
γνο-root words, Porter recognizes this as a word-concept fallacy, which these
types of studies tend to commit, and utilizes the Louw-Nida lexicon as a way
to include all of the words that fit into the semantic domain of knowledge. He
examines the sixteen separate entries in the first subdomain “know” of Louw-
Nida, documenting the frequency of each of these words in the Pauline corpus.
Several conclusions are drawn from this statistical analysis of knowledge
words in Paul. One is that this examination reveals that many of the disputed
letters of Paul actually cohere better with some of the Hauptbriefe than others
of the Hauptbriefe. The second conclusion is that limiting this type of study to
γνο-root words certainly does not capture everything that is said regarding the
concept of knowledge in Paul. By opening up the study to related words, not
just γνο-root words, there are a number of intriguing questions that arise.
Question: How exactly does using the Louw-Nida lexicon, that is based on semantic domains, can help avoid the word-concept fallacy when an exegete uses a non-semantic-domain lexicon exclusively?
It would be great if the answer can also include a few representative examples contrasting using the Louw-Nida lexicon versus the older, more common, Greek lexicons.
