How to Use Biblical Greek and Hebrew to Deepen Your Understanding of Scripture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izSzfEi858A

When I tell people that I run a software company that teaches Biblical Greek and Hebrew, they often respond with questions about how much “richer” or “deeper” the Bible is in the original. Bible study leaders will say things like, “I don’t know Greek, but I look up the Greek words on Blue Letter Bible. The meaning is just so much richer.” While we are all at different places in our Bible study journeys, I want to suggest that there is a better way to use Biblical Greek and Hebrew to deepen your understanding of Scripture.

Use a concordance, not a dictionary

A concordance allows you to search for a word, while a dictionary gives you a definition of a word. Definitions are based on how words are used, and they can sometimes be misleading. For example, Google tells us that the meaning of drown is ‘die through submersion in and inhalation of water.’ No doubt this is probably what people naturally think of when they hear the word drown. However, not all instances of the word drown mean this, as Google also tells us. The example Google pulls from Oxford Languages is “Good pizza is not eight inches thick and drowned in tomato sauce” (total agreement there).

So here’s the issue. Definitions normally only take into account some of the uses of the words. No one dies when we cover eight inches of dough in tomato sauce (though as a pizza-lover and maker myself, part of me might die at the sight of that). Definitions are also just summaries of a group of uses. Rather than relying on someone else’s description (it is notoriously difficult, by the way, to describe word uses), you can instead just go to the uses themselves. This is what a concordance gives you.

Let’s take a real example, such as the first word in the Bible is בְּרֵאשִׁית ‘in the beginning.’ When you look up this word on Blue Letter Bible, you will see four different glosses as follows:

1. Beginning

1. First

1. Chief

1. Choice part

This gives us an idea of the range of meaning, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. What does “first” mean here? Is it referring to something like “first in line” or “first place” or “first slice of cake” or “first child”? Can the Hebrew word רֵאשִׁית be used for all those English “firsts”? And what about “chief”? Is this the “chief of a tribe” or a parent’s “chief concern” for their children?

Of course, we could ask the same questions about the other English glosses. The problem is that we don’t know without looking at how the word is actually used. That’s the kind of information we want, and that is the kind of information a concordance gives us. We can quickly read all the examples with a particular word in it and see what kind of ‘beginning’, ‘first’, ‘chief’, and ‘choice part’ the Hebrew word can refer to. Apps like Blue Letter Bible also provide a concordance, so it is super easy to search for words using all kinds of free resources. That sets us up to figure out what the word means in a particular context.

Consider meanings, not words

One mistake I often see made when people talk about Greek and Hebrew words is that they put too much meaning into a single word. The Greek word ἀρχή ‘beginning’ is roughly equivalent to the Hebrew word רֵאשִׁית ‘beginning’ that we just discussed. Blue Letter Bible’s dictionary provides a different set of glosses, though. Here are the first three:

1. Beginning, origin

1. The person or thing that commences, the first person or thing in a series, the leader

1. That by which anything begins to be, the origin, the active cause

This word ἀρχή ‘beginning’ is used at the beginning of John in the phrase ‘In the beginning (ἀρχῇ) was the word.’ I can almost audibly hear a preacher now explaining that the Greek word ἀρχή does not just mean ‘beginning’, but it means the ‘origin’ of something or ‘the active cause.’ So John uses this word at the beginning of his Gospel to hint that the Word/Jesus was not only there in the beginning, but he is also the origin and cause of everything.

That preaches well, but it isn’t right. When multiple definitions are given for a word, they do not all apply at the same time to a given occurrence of a word. Let’s go back to the shameful individual who made the pizza with the 8-inch crust drowning in sauce. The word ‘drown’ here does not also mean that someone died by inhaling too much water, even though that is a gloss of the word. It either means death by inhalation of water or it means putting too much liquid ingredient on a food. It does not mean both simultaneously. This is not to say that both meanings of drown are totally unrelated, but it is to say that they have a different set of inferences associated with them. When a person drowns, we infer that someone dies. When a pizza drowns in sauce, we make no such inference.

When we come back to John 1:1, the word ἀρχή ‘beginning’ only refers to the temporal beginning. It does not also refer to Jesus as the active cause of anything. After we have used a concordance to determine the range of meaning, we then need to pick from the kinds of meanings the word can convey. Current linguistic research says that about 80% of words are polysemous (meaning they have more than one possible meaning), so we will normally have more than one option to choose from after looking at all the ways the word is used. In order to determine what the word means in a particular context, we want to see how it is used in other similar contexts. Our description of what the word means should then include the particular meaning in that context and not every meaning in all possible contexts. That is a misleading (and wrong) way to characterize what a word means.

Don’t rely on a translation

The best way to use Greek and Hebrew to transform the way you read the Bible is to ditch translations altogether. You can learn Greek and Hebrew for yourself and read the Bible in the original languages. Although a lot of people feel like this is an impossible task, we at Biblingo are here to try to convince you that it is not. Biblingo is designed to take anyone from nothing to reading the Bible in the original languages. Reading the Bible for yourself in Greek and Hebrew are one of the best ways to deepen your understanding of Scripture. Sign up for a free 10-day trial today and check it out for yourself.