Hebrew and Greek Word Studies for Beginners: How to Look Up a Word Without Getting It Wrong

Why look at the original at all

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew with a little Aramaic, and the New Testament in Greek. Every English Bible is a translation, and translators have to make choices because no word in one language matches a word in another exactly. When you read the same verse in several versions and the wording changes, the cause is usually a word that can be taken more than one way. Looking at the original shows you where the choice was made, and often explains why.

The hesed of Psalm 23:6 is a good example. Different translations give "mercy," "lovingkindness," "steadfast love" and "goodness," which look quite different on the page. The Hebrew word describes loyal love that keeps a promise, and English has no single word for it. Seeing that explains why the translators struggled.

Free tools and what each one does

You do not need to know the languages to use these, though you do need to be careful. Several free websites let you click an English word and see the Hebrew or Greek behind it, with the dictionary entry.

The mistakes that fill sermons

In 1984 the New Testament scholar D. A. Carson published a book called Exegetical Fallacies, collecting the errors preachers and students most often make with the original languages. A few of them come up so regularly that every beginner should know them.

• **The root fallacy.** Taking a word's meaning from its parts, instead of from how it is used. People say the Greek ekklesia (church) means "called out" because it is built from words meaning "out" and "call." In everyday Greek it simply meant an assembly, such as the city gathering described in Acts 19:32 and 19:39. What a word's parts meant long ago does not decide what it means now.
• **Semantic anachronism.** Reading a modern meaning back into an ancient word. The Greek dunamis is a word for power, and is the root of the English words dynamic and dynamite. Preachers have claimed that the gospel is "the dynamite of God" (Romans 1:16), but dynamite was invented in 1867, so Paul could not have meant it.
• **Illegitimate totality transfer.** Carrying every meaning a word can have into one verse. A word may have six possible senses, and in any one sentence it almost always has one.
• **Treating similar words as sharply different.** The best-known example is next.

A famous example: agape and phileo

Greek has more than one word for love, and it is common to hear that agape means unconditional, divine love, and phileo means a lesser, human affection. The claim is often made about the conversation between Jesus and Peter in John 21, where Jesus asks "Do you love (agapao) me?" and Peter answers "you know I love (phileo) you." It sounds persuasive and makes a good sermon.

The trouble is that John does not use the words that way elsewhere. John 3:35 says the Father loves (agapao) the Son, and John 5:20 says the Father loves (phileo) the Son, using each word of the same relationship. In 2 Timothy 4:10 Paul says that Demas deserted him, "having loved (agapao) this present world." A word that can describe love for the world cannot be restricted to love that is divine. The conversation in John 21 may still be deliberate, since the writer likes to vary his vocabulary, but its meaning cannot rest on a sharp split between the two words.

A six-step method

Here is a method that avoids most of those traps. You can follow it with only free tools.

• **Pick the word and the verse.** Choose one word in one passage that you want to understand, usually one where translations differ.
• **Find the original.** Use an interlinear to see the Hebrew or Greek word, and note its Strong's number.
• **See the range.** Read the entry in a lexicon to see the different ways the word is used, and which examples are given for each.
• **Let the context decide.** Look at the sentence, the paragraph and the book. Ask which of the listed meanings fits there, and why.
• **Check the author's own use.** Use the Strong's number to find the same word elsewhere in the same book, or by the same writer, and see how he uses it.
• **Compare and check.** Read several translations and at least one commentary. If your result is very different from all of them, be suspicious of it.

What a good word study looks like

A well-done word study is usually modest. It does not announce a secret meaning no translator ever noticed. It explains why a verse reads the way it does, and sometimes shows a connection with another passage. In the first chapter of John, the verb eskenosen ("lived") comes from the word for a tent, and recognising that links the verse with the tabernacle in Exodus. That is a legitimate use of the original language because it comes from how the writer uses the word in its setting, and it adds to the sense without overturning it.

This is how each lesson on Little Vine Rooted handles its word studies. Each word is shown with its transliteration, a short gloss, and a note on how it works in that verse, and not a list of every meaning it could have. If you want to practise the method on a passage that has been done carefully, our post on John 1:14 is a worked example, and the post on how to read the Bible puts word studies in their place within a wider approach.