Semantic studies of the Biblical Hebrew verb שׁלם have been influenced by those of its most invoked nominal form שָׁלוֹם‎. In this volume Andrew Chin Hei Leong shows that the concepts of balance, alliance, and completeness form the basic semantic structure of שׁלם.
Previous studies on שׁלם employed either historical or textual methodology, which has been dominant in biblical lexical studies. In addition to these methods, in Leong develops a systematic semantic methodology from Cognitive Semantics and Frame Semantics, to demonstrate that it is balance, rather than completeness, that is the most central concept in holding the semantic network together.