Original Language Research: What to Do, What Not to Do

Logos is the only software tool I use to study the original languages of Scripture, and I use it practically every day. I use Logos because it is fast, reliable, and beautiful. And I use the original languages because in my (Protestant) view of Scripture, “in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them” (WCF 8). It is the Hebrew and Greek that provide the ultimate lexical standard for doctrine.

Honestly, however, I’m not driven primarily by controversies of religion, though they have their important place in the development of doctrine. I just want to know what God said, and I stand with Erasmus, who said in the first-ever published edition of the Greek New Testament,

I perceived that that teaching which is our salvation was to be had in much purer and more lively form if sought at the fountain-head and drawn from the actual sources than from pools and streams.¹

What are the original languages of Scripture?

Let’s get some basics out of the way:

1. The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew over the course of approximately a thousand years.

Whether or not the Hebrew Bible reflects language change over that period is a difficult and disputed question.² We have access to very little biblical Hebrew outside the Old Testament. Mainly we have inscriptions, often biblical ones.

2. Certain portions of Daniel and Ezra are written in Aramaic.³

3. The New Testament was originally written in Greek over a period of just a few decades within the first century (AD).

The language of the New Testament was the “common” (Greek, koine) Greek of the time. It was the lingua franca of the Roman world, including the Holy Land. Even a “Pharisee of the Pharisees,” the Apostle Paul, had excellent command of Greek. We have vast amounts of ancient Greek to use in our study of the language.

What is original language research?

Original language research—in the context of biblical studies—is digging beneath the English (or French or Russian or Urdu) translation of the Bible so that one may primarily read to discover what the biblical writers were originally inspired to write.

The goal is not to discover errors in our many excellent translations, though this may occasionally occur. The goal is to achieve the slightly greater level of clarity one can achieve by looking at the original instead of studying the photocopies.

Why is original language research important for Bible study?

Study of the Hebrew and Greek is important for a number of reasons.

1. Bible translations sometimes differ, and those in pursuit of truth need to know why.

Only by appeal to the originals can we discern why many English translations have Jesus using a spatial metaphor at Matthew 6:27 while others have him using a temporal metaphor. Without access to the Greek, this kind of discrepancy would be baffling—as indeed it is to the many people who ask me why a given translation differs from others at particular places.

2. The meanings of words change.

Another major reason careful Bible students dig down to the original language level is that looking up a particular English word—like “reconciliation” in Romans 5:11—in a contemporary English dictionary may or may not relay precisely the same information intended by the original language word it translates.

Countless words in any given language are built on top of metaphors from real-life experience. The Greek word underlying “reconciliation” (as it is used in most modern translations), for example, comes from a word meaning “exchange,” as in an exchange of money. It’s a fallacy to assume that a word’s history provides its real or true meaning—as if Christ’s reconciliation of the whole world to himself (2 Cor 5:19) is most fundamentally an exchange of divine currency. But the metaphor a Bible student discovers in a word’s history may still end up being useful for illustrating the meaning of that word. For example, a Bible teacher might point out—without mentioning that this comes from Greek—that reconciliation is a kind of exchanging of hostilities for peace.

3. Translation work can obscure contextual connections.

A third reason the original languages are helpful lies in minor but definite contextual connections that are necessarily obscured by translation.

In John 15, the Greek word often translated “abide” occurs multiple times in various forms. It usually doesn’t work in English translation to use the same English word to translate that Greek word for every occurrence. But you can use the Formatting tab in Logos to emphasize corresponding words at the original language level, even if you don’t know Greek.

If you do, you’ll find that the Greek word repeatedly translated as “remain” in the NIV in John 15 also appears in John 15:16 in the phrase “fruit that will last.” Perhaps there is a connection here worth exploring, perhaps not. Without access to the original languages, however, you’re less likely to raise that potentially fruitful question.

How does original language research improve our understanding of Scripture?

I’ve done some work so far to show the value of the study of Hebrew and Greek. I want to pause, however, to insist—along with a large number of highly trained biblical scholars—that the value of original language research is marginal compared to the value of studying the Bible in your heart language.

Now it just so happens that with a text as important as God’s Word, even marginal gains can be important, even essential. But English-speaking evangelical Protestants such as myself have historically agreed with the legendary KJV translators, who said in their profoundly beautiful and intelligent preface,

We do not deny, nay, we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English … containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God: as the King’s speech which he uttered in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian and Latin, is still the King’s speech, though it be not interpreted by every translator with the like grace, nor peradventure so fitly for phrase, nor so expressly for sense, everywhere.⁴

God’s Word is God’s Word in translation, not just in the originals. God can speak every language there is. Christians often enter original language research expecting to finally uncover the true meaning, the bedrock meaning, the (to change the metaphor) layer of pure gold underneath the ugly and malformed clay of translation. If you have this perspective, you will be disappointed. The Greek word for “sheep” means “sheep.” The Hebrew word for “love” means “love.” The ancient Jews and ancient Christians were people just like us who didn’t have special languages full of extra, glittering meaning. They just went around saying stuff about things the same way we do. And though their best narratives and epistles and poems—which we can read in our Bibles today—do rise to a literary level higher than that of normal speech, it doesn’t enter an ethereal realm of special Holy Spirit language.

Christians of one common persuasion may say (and I’ll borrow here from Moisés Silva, who is not endorsing this view) that “human language, being an imperfect medium, cannot convey a perfect divine message.”⁵ Christians of the opposite persuasion may say that any language chosen by the Spirit of God must be charged with extra meaning, or certainly extra precision.⁶ Both approaches assume that divine language, to count as divine, must carry a measure of perfection that normal human language cannot. The liberal looks at the demonstrably human language of Scripture and concludes that it’s not fully divine; the conservative looks at the obviously divine language of Scripture and concludes that it’s not fully human.

Original language research does for us what meeting Jesus in the flesh would have done in the first century: It brings us face to face with something you and I would not have invented; namely, incarnation. Jesus was (and is) fully divine and fully human; Scripture, in an analogous way, is too. To study Hebrew and Greek is to be reminded both of the amazing, divine gift of language—which I often point out was not created by God; he had it before the foundation of the world (Gen 1:26, “Then God said …”)—and the frustrating imprecision⁷ and confoundings it can bring. Not infrequently, original language research does more to eliminate linguistically impossible interpretations than it does to establish the one right interpretation.

Another little note: There are earnest Christians out there who love the Bible dearly but who end up injecting some superstition into their viewpoints on it. Study of the original languages helps inoculate Bible readers against non-existent hermeneutical principles such as the “Law of First Mention,” in which (supposedly) the first mention of a given topic in Scripture contains in seed form all the rest of the Bible’s teaching on that topic. Someone who knows how to use Hebrew or Greek even a little will immediately smell a rat, and a desiccated one at that, because English words do not map one-to-one with Hebrew or Greek ones. How could the phrase “without form” in Genesis 1:2, for example, contain the Bible’s whole teaching on “form” (and what would that even mean?) when the Hebrew word there, תֹּהוּ, gets translated in around ten different ways in the KJV alone?

Again, knowledge of Hebrew and Greek improves our understanding of Scripture, often by giving us a filter to catch bad interpretations, not by reliably teaching us the one true and right interpretation.

How can one get started with original language research?

There’s nothing sacrosanct about going to school to learn something. It’s a matter of utilitarian practicality: Difficult and complicated things are hard to learn without some kind of structure, some kind of accountability, and some kind of personal model or influence. If you can go to school to learn Hebrew and Greek, my advice is to do it. Schools aren’t perfect, and it is often depressing for Hebrew and Greek teachers to hear what people do with their knowledge of the original languages. But I don’t know of a better way to learn Hebrew and Greek. The Logos Seminary Guide can point you toward a good school near you.

But if you can’t go to school, if you have a job and a spouse and three cute little matters of utilitarian practicality between the ages of four and ten, you’re not without hope. For one thing, I wrote a free Complete Beginner’s Guide to Biblical Greek that will help you set goals and find strategies to meet them.

And here’s another suggestion: Determine from the very beginning of whatever Hebrew and Greek study you undertake that you will be willing to go more slowly in order to incorporate some reading about language and exegesis. Let’s say you pick up the course “Learn to Use Biblical Greek and Hebrew in Logos” from Logos Mobile Ed (or Greek for the Rest of Us: Learn Greek to Study the New Testament with Interlinears and Bible Software by Bill Mounce, or even the workbooks I learned from⁸). Along with these resources, I’d encourage you to listen avidly to courses on language from linguist John McWhorter, to read D. A. Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies, to absorb Moisés Silva’s Biblical Words and Their Meaning, to peruse my friends’ work Linguistics & Biblical Exegesis in the Lexham Methods series.

I have seen too many people stumble into interpretive silliness or arrogance through the study of Hebrew and Greek. I’m convinced that knowledge of language more generally is an essential corrective. Not only that, I think the combination of studying the languages and studying language will genuinely assist you in your Bible study.

How do interlinear Bibles work, and are these useful for original language research?

Interlinear Bibles are an intermediate tool, one that, truth be told, even the experts sometimes rely on. Interlinear Bibles place English glosses (and often other grammatical information) “between the lines”—interlinear—of Hebrew or Greek scriptural text.

I do not use interlinear Bibles in print. They are cumbersome—and they’re stuck. They’re stuck at a particular phase of Hebrew or Greek knowledge. They give me an English gloss (translational equivalent) for every single Hebrew or Greek word, which is what beginners need, not what I need.

I use interlinears in Logos because I can tell Logos not to give me glosses for words I ought already to know. I can also generate an interlinear—or a reverse interlinear, one that puts the Greek/Hebrew in between the English lines instead of the other way ’round—from effectively any Bible translation. Here’s the ESV with “interlinear” turned on in the View tab:

When Hebrew or Greek get tricky to parse out, even for experienced students, it’s often because the word order in the original language is so different from that of the English. It can be very helpful to have these aligned for you in advance by people who’ve already done all that parsing.

Sometimes, the struggle an English reader in particular may have with the Hebrew and Greek is the lack of what are called “copulas.” In the image above, notice the dot (•) underneath the word “are,” the second word in each Beatitude. That word is elided, that is, left out of the Greek, because it isn’t necessary in that language like it is in English. Even to know that there is no Greek word to look for to match up with the English is itself helpful.

What are some common challenges around original language research?

Original language research is an intimidating, bottomless well. There will always be someone who knows Hebrew or Greek better than you do—or at least who will claim to online! It can be hard to know when you’re done with your study of a given word or passage; there’s always more to read (especially with a large Logos library!).

There are also difficulties peculiar to Hebrew and Greek.

In Hebrew, the study of many rare words is made incredibly difficult by the mere fact that they occur only a few times—or even just once—in the Hebrew Bible, and nowhere else in the whole history of the world before or even around the time of the Hebrew Bible’s composition. The KJV translators were well aware of this. They said,

There be many words in the Scriptures which be never found there but once (having neither brother nor neighbour, as the Hebrews speak), so that we cannot be helped by conference of places.⁹

Being “helped by conference of places” is the KJV translators’ way of saying that we know what words mean by listening carefully to how they’re used. And if a word (or phrase) is used rarely, we don’t get that help. Etymology can help us in that case, and so can checking ancient languages that were cognate to Hebrew, such as Akkadian and even Arabic. For this kind of study, invaluable but complex reference works, such as The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), are essential tools.

In Greek, the difficulty is having too much extrabiblical literature to survey. Some of the literature that is arguably relevant to the study of Greek is written in classical Greek that Koine students find most difficult to read. Most students of the New Testament today are not equipped to read even Koine Greek from outside the New Testament. For this kind of work, invaluable but complex reference works, such as A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG), are essential tools.

How do you conduct a word study using original language tools?

Most Hebrew and Greek words that are worth study are not so rare (Hebrew) or so complex (Greek) that study should be reserved for elite original language researchers. Genuine profit can be had by the average student who has put the time in to learn the proper methodologies.

I have written a workflow for Logos entitled “English Word Study.” It will take you step by step through a study of one biblical word of your choice in English. If you haven’t studied Hebrew or Greek, or not much, start there.

But there is also a workflow in Logos entitled “Word Study (Original Language),” and it will guide you through the use of Logos resources to study a Hebrew or Greek word of your choice. This would be the place to start if you are a beginning or intermediate student unsure of first steps.

Your basic goal in any word study, no matter your level, is to observe how a word is used to gain clues as to its meaning.

If the word is a verb, for example, you need to ask questions like the following:

• Who in Scripture performs this action?
• Who receives this action—what are its direct objects, if any?
• What are the indirect objects of this action?

You are hardwired by God himself to be capable of this work; it’s how you learned your mother tongue. You saw your mother use her tongue to form certain sounds, and you began to see a connection between those sounds and the actions she was performing or the objects she was holding. A word study workflow is a way of reminding you of the questions you were eager to ask as a baby but have forgotten to ask as an adult.

What are some common Greek and Hebrew words every Bible student should know?

I am convinced that Bible students don’t need to know any Hebrew or Greek words in order to know their Bibles well. None.*

But let me explain that asterisk. A certain set of Hebrew and Greek words have effectively become English ones through their use in the Christian community. Last night at my church’s worship music team practice, someone wondered out loud as to the proper pronunciation of the Hebrew word, found seventy-four times in the Psalms (I know this thanks to the Logos Bible Word Study!) but of uncertain meaning, selah.¹⁰

Here’s a short glossary of other Hebrew and Greek words that, in my judgment, are common enough among Bible-loving Christians to count as English words—much as “beeves” is a bona fide English word, but only among cattle ranchers. (I’ll omit “hallelujah” and “amen” and “Messiah” and any other Hebrew or Greek words that are English words known outside of Christianity.¹¹) I won’t italicize these words, because they have become English words.

Hebrew words many English-speaking Christians know

• Yahweh: the covenant name of God, the Lord
• Immanuel: quite literally, “with us God”
• Elohim: the generic name for God (Gen 1:1) or even gods (Ps 86:8)
• Adonai: “master” or “lord”
• Hosanna: “save now,” which became an affirmation of praise (Ps 118:25)
• Selah: a term of unknown meaning, perhaps liturgical or musical
• Hesed: loyal love, covenant love (Ruth 1:8; 2:20; 3:10)
• Torah: “instruction” or “law,” now often a name for the Pentateuch

Greek words many English-speaking Christians know

• Logos: the “word” spoken of John 1; also well known as the name of some excellent Bible software that’s probably on sale now
• Agape: a word for love that I wish were not quite so well known, because what people know about it is usually wrong
• Ekklesia: “church” or “assembly”
• Koinonia: usually means “rich fellowship” among Christians
• Kenosis: “emptying”; the action of Christ described in Philippians
• Kyrie: “Lord”; still known for its appearance in Latin liturgical texts (as a holdover from the days when the liturgy was in Greek) and therefore for its frequent appearance in the Western choral tradition; part of the phrase kyrie eleison, or “Lord, have mercy”
• Kerygma: “preaching” or “message”; something of a technical term used in Anglophone theology to describe the message of Jesus or of Paul

Knowledge of these words may or may not help you understand Scripture, but they will help you understand the talk of the evangelical cognoscenti. One must definitely be careful to remember that what modern Christians mean by these words (because they have become essentially Christian technical terms) can easily stray from what the words meant to Moses and Paul.

How does original language research contribute to more accurate biblical exegesis?

No one answers this question better than Moisés Silva:

A measure of proficiency in the biblical languages provides the framework that promotes responsibility in the handling of the text. Continued exposure to the original text expands our horizon and furnishes us with a fresh and more authentic perspective than that which we bring from our modern, English-speaking situation.¹²

I’ve pointed out before on this blog that these comments from Silva are rather vague—but I don’t blame him for that. Like so, so many valuable things in life, the benefits of knowing Greek can’t truly be understood from the outside, only from the inside. Who can know the delights of being able to play Bach beautifully on the piano? Not me. Who can know the pleasure of hitting a sprinting receiver in stride forty yards away, in the end zone, with a perfectly arcing ultimate frisbee pass? Actually, I can. It’s what keeps bringing me back to the sport every week. I don’t know anyone who has really put their hand to the Greek plow and regretted it. (If they do, they’re not fit for the kingdom of Logos.)

Let me try another tack: If you want to be persuasive for whatever you regard to be the truth among people who know what they’re talking about when it comes to the Bible, you will probably have to have some facility with Hebrew or Greek. I think accurate understanding of the Bible can be had without it, but only at—my mind searches for metaphors—a certain zoom level. The finest details, the ones most needed when Christians are trying to persuade other people, are in the original languages.

What resources are ideal for conducting original language research?

This is the Logos blog. Do you think I’m going to point you to another tool?

But let me to return to my opening lines: I use Logos because it has proven to be the very best tool for the job of original language research. I recently did a deep dive into other Bible apps for the iPhone (forthcoming). I spent hours and hours looking at the major options in the space. There are some nice apps out there, though not as many as I thought there would be.¹³ The Literal Word app is one I found to be rather elegant and useful. It even gives me some very basic access to the Hebrew and Greek. But when I want to do anything more than a quick search, I get frustrated if I don’t have access to Logos. I am a day-in, day-out biblical studies writer and exegete. I use the Bible Word Study and other Logos tools—especially original language texts and original language commentaries—non-stop. I really have tried everything else, and I won’t go back. Logos is the best.

Within Logos, here are my most-used tools for Hebrew and Greek exegesis:

• The Logos Bible Word Study, especially the translation tab (to see how a given Hebrew or Greek word gets translated in various translations)
• BDAG, an incredibly detailed and useful Greek–English lexicon
• HALOT, a challenging but authoritative Hebrew–English lexicon
• The SBLGNT (alternatively: THGNT, or NA28), a solid critical text of the Greek New Testament
• The Lexham Hebrew Bible (alternatively: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia), a digitized “diplomatic text”¹⁴ of the Hebrew Bible
• Numerous Bible translations in English and other languages

I’d be sad without the many nice commentaries I got with the Logos Platinum Library. I’d be a little frustrated without the powerful searching and highlighting tools in Logos. But I’d be lost without the tools I just listed.

I love original language research, because I love God’s Word and I want to understand and teach accurately what he inspired.

Resources mentioned in this article:

Mobile Ed: Learn to Use Biblical Greek and Hebrew in Logos (2 courses)

Regular price: $659.99

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Exegetical Fallacies, 2nd ed.

Regular price: $17.99

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Biblical Words and Their Meaning, 2nd ed.

Regular price: $19.99

Add to cart

Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament | HALOT (5 vols.)

Regular price: $159.99

Add to cart

A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (BDAG)

Regular price: $164.99

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The Greek New Testament with Apparatus: SBL Edition (SBL)

Regular price: $0.00

Add to cart

Lexham Hebrew Bible with Morphology (LHB)

Regular price: $49.99

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Related articles

• 5 More Reasons Bible Teachers Should Learn Greek & Hebrew
• 5 Reasons Studying the Original Languages Is Worth the Pain
• Exegetical Crises of Faith: 12 Tips for Struggling Students & Professors
• What Does the Greek Word “Logos” Mean?
• Tips for Students Preparing to Learn a Biblical Language

1. Desiderius Erasmus, Ep. 384:51–55, quoted in Joi Christians, “Erasmus and the New Testament: Humanist Scholarship or Theological Convictions?,” Trinity Journal 19, no. 1 (1998): 26. I quietly updated the translation of “runnels” to “streams.”
2. There is some disagreement—and great complexity and uncertainty—involved with this question. See Ziony Zevit, ed., Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew, Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic (Eisenbrauns, 2012).
3. “Large portions of the biblical books Ezra (4:8–6:8 and 7:12–26) and Daniel (2:4–7:28) are written in Aramaic, as are Jer 10:11 and two words of Gen 31:47.” William B. Fullilove, “Aramaic Language,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Lexham Press, 2016).
4. David Norton, ed., The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James Version, rev. ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1:xxviii.
5. Moisés Silva, God, Language, and Scripture (Zondervan Academic, 1991), 33.
6. See the fantastic article by Nathaniel Erickson, “Is New Testament Greek the Most Precise Language Known to Mankind?,” Word by Word (Logos blog), August 12, 2022.
7. See linguist and theologian Vern Poythress’s excellent chapter “Words and Precision” in his Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology (P&R Publishing, 2001).
8. These workbooks were written in part by Randy Leedy, whose diagrams of the Greek New Testament would be good to pick up somewhere along your journey of learning Greek.
9. The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James Version, rev. ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1:xxxiii.
10. See, however, Ashley Lyon, “What Does Selah Mean?” Word by Word (Logos blog), January 24, 2023.
11. Then there’s the category of words, like eros, that don’t actually appear in the New Testament but are commonly known to be Koine Greek words. Then there are New Testament Greek words that people may not know are New Testament Greek words because they’re so common in English, such as “martyr.” Language is fun!
12. Silva, Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation, 278.
13. There are also some unbelievable pieces of software schlock that call themselves Bible apps, and this must be said.
14. This means it is not a critical text; it is a letter-for-letter digitization of one particular, millennium-old text of the Hebrew Bible, the famous Leningrad Codex.