The three terms stand together in Leviticus 16 and Exodus 34 without any definition attached, and the graded reading is supplied by rabbinic literature centuries afterwards. Whether biblical Hebrew already distinguishes the three roots this way, or whether the distinction is a rabbinic construction laid over a rhetorical triplet, is a question of lexical semantics that this entry did not attempt to settle.
What would resolve this A corpus study of every occurrence of the three roots in the Hebrew Bible, read alongside the Northwest Semitic epigraphic material, testing whether the intention grading holds independently of the rabbinic gloss.
OpenBiblical Hebrew lexicography; Northwest Semitic philologyDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition