What Bibles or concordances can I use to understand the Greek/Hebrew words better?
Question:
I want to study out the New Testament and learn the Greek/Hebrew original words to understand it better. Do you know of any good Bibles, or concordances, etc?
Answer:
I commend your desire to “take it deeper” and to study the scriptures more comprehensively. We tend to get out of our Bible study in proportion to what we put into it, and it is clear that you are prepared to put in more than the average Christian.
Before giving you suggestions, let me start with a word of caution. I have heard it said, and I tend to believe it, that a little knowledge of Greek and Hebrew can do more harm than good. Some people, armed with just a little knowledge of the original biblical languages begin immediately supplying novel explanations of biblical passages based on just a little knowledge. This is not always a problem, but those who know only a little grammar–who do not know the many declensions of nouns and pronouns as well as the conjugations of verbs and the subtle differences brought in by tense use in the Greek vs. English can get into trouble pretty quickly. The truth is that if a Bible student really; wants access to use of the biblical languages in order to understand the scriptures beyond what any non-speaker of Greek and Hebrew can get from a translation, they will need to devote hundreds of hours and several years to studying the languages.
May I suggest that, for the short term, you should not plan on being able to use knowledge of Greek and Hebrew to get deeper knowledge of the meaning of scripture. If you have several translations of a relevant passage, and if you take into account all the different English translations, you can get a really good feel for the meaning of the original. Until you have a LOT of knowledge of the languages, using translations will probably be of more help than knowing the languages.
With that proviso, I believe there is actually still a fair amount of room for you to begin using the biblical languages in a limited but nevertheless helpful way. This is my suggestion. You should get an exhaustive concordance first, and then, when you can afford it, a Greek and/or Hebrew interlinear version of the New or Old Testament. My exhaustive concordance to the NIV (published by Zondervan) is my most valued Bible study tool, by far. Here is how it works. If you are reading a passage whose meaning you want to probe more deeply, with words whose meaning you want to know more deeply, then begin looking up the words in the exhaustive concordance. Let me give an example. Let us say I want to know the meaning of worship in John 4:24 (I literally took this at random). Look up the word worship in the concordance. You will find it there listed under John 4:24. You will find a word number. This is your key to discovering the Greek word being used which is translated as “worship.” In this case, the word is, in our alphabet, proskyneo. When you look up the word in the back, you will find all the uses of the Greek word in the NT. In addition, you will find all the words it is translated into in English. You can then look up all the verses using this particular Greek word. The Greek word, in this case, is translated as worship, worshipped, knelt before, fall on ones’ knees, paid homage, reverence, worships and more. Do you see that you now have a great idea of in what sense the Greek word proskyneo means worship. Now, you can go back to the word worship in your exhaustive concordance. You will find that other Greek words are translated as worship. You can do a similar study of these Greek words. You will find that the English word worship has a meaning which is not precisely the same as any single Greek word. This is fun and is really cool stuff.
Let me reiterate that things such as tense, nominative, accusative, dative ablative declension and so forth will NOT be done well by this approach. For a really sticky question you might have to simply ask someone who is a real expert in the language. You might want to set the goal of being one of those experts youself, but do not fool yourself. Many hundreds of hours of study will be required before you really start to be able to do much better than anyone willing to use tools such as described above, combinded with hard work.
I suggest that, as you go along, you also might want to get an Greek/English or a Hebrew/English interlinear. This allows you to see word-for-word what English word is translated from what Greek or Hebrew word in the original. You get additional information from this, such as word order in the original and the connection between adjective and noun, etc. A Greek or Hebrew lexicon (a fancy word for a dictionary) can also be helpful.
I hope this gets you started.
John Oakes
