Fallacies in Grudem's Lexicographical Method

I just wanted to make a couple notes here, as I think they are instructive. Grudem, as many older scholars, tends to employ a variety of fallacies in their word studies. I wanted to note a couple here in his recent argument to extend the reasons for divorce and remarriage.

He argues that τοιούτοις found in 1 Corinthians 7:15 only appears once in the NT, so he had to go and find examples in secular Greek of the word in order to obtain knowledge as to how the word commonly functioned in those texts. 

First, let me say that this statement might be a bit deceiving. When Grudem says that it only appears once in the NT, what he means is that the word in its neuter, plural, dative form only appears once. That seems to suggest that Grudem wants to argue that its gender, number, and case have something to do with its semantic range. I think that is a fallacy commonly deployed by scholars in thinking that somehow if a dative is used, for instance, the word suddenly means something different than if it is found in a different case. Imagine if I were to suggest that the word "house" means something different when in the dative "I live in a house" versus the accusative "I bought a house." These are different statements because of the surrounding context, not because the case changes the meaning of the word.

If we remove the case as a factor, the word actually appears 16 times in the NT. If we remove number as a factor (again, does "house" change its essential meaning in the plural or does the plural merely increase the number of whatever "house" means?), there are 32 uses in the NT. Remove gender and it moves up to 55 occurrences. With the article, there are 27 occurrences. Remove all and there are 9 occurrences in 1 Corinthians alone. So there are a lot more instances of the word that allow us to see its unmarked meaning.

Second to this, how the word is used in secular Greek cannot tell us how Paul is using it in a particular context. The question is not how others have used the word, even if the word carries some heavily nuanced idea that indicates something other than its context specifically references (which I don't agree that it does). 

Third, words don't carry all of the meaning these word studies tend to pour into them. They have very basic meanings in and of themselves and any referent assigned to the word, such as Grudem does here, is a lexical fallacy I call "illegitimate referential transference," where references found in other texts is being assigned as part of the meaning of the word that it carries into foreign texts, often ignoring the referents found in that foreign context or adding to them, again, as Grudem does here. 

Fourth, the nine occurrences in 1 Corinthians (and frankly beyond) use an example group to represent a larger group who are identified as having the same characteristics as the example group. This means that our text here merely asserts that the cases in which an unbeliever divorces the believer is to allow it to occur. The other cases referred to with the term τοιούτοις refer to parallel cases where there is an unbeliever who divorces his believing spouse. It says nothing about the reverse at all. Such has to be read into the text.