Context is king!

The communication of meaning in Hebrew was not determined at all by what the words meant in Arabic, and was not primarily determined by what they meant in proto-Semitic; it was primarily determined by the choice between the words available in Hebrew. Because words operate in relation to one another within Hebrew, all philological solutions to particular difficulties have to be considered not only in themselves, for the satisfaction they give in a particular difficult context, but also in their more general implications, for the effect they have on the total balance of the available series of choices in Hebrew.—James Barr, in Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament, 293