Studying the Bible: On Strong’s Concordance and Biblical Languages

Let’s talk about languages, particularly, Biblical languages: Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. These are very different from English. Greek has five grammatical cases, for example, and Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have tenses, strictly speaking.¹Modern Hebrew has reworked its verbal system on the basis of European languages so that it does have tenses. Many people are interested in looking at the underlying languages of the translation they’re reading. Frankly, to paraphrase King Benjamin,

I cannot tell you all the things whereby ye may commit linguistic sin; for there are divers ways and means, even so many that I cannot number them.

Even people with a semester or two can make serious errors.

So… what about Strong’s Concordance?

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First off, Strong’s was meant as a concordance— not a dictionary—  a resource cataloguing where every particular English, Greek, and Hebrew word appears. (There are also English concordances for things like the D&C and Book of Mormon.)  The primary use of concordances has mostly been killed by electronic searching.

Let’s say you wanted to know everywhere the Hebrew for “thou shalt not kill” from the 10 Commandments appears. So you would look up “kill” in Strongs, scroll down the entries until you found Exodus 20 (or Deuteronomy 5, the two locations of the Ten Commandments), and it would tell you the Hebrew word and a Strong’s number assigned to that word. Then you’d look up the Strong’s number for that Hebrew word, and it tells you every passage where that HEBREW word appears. That’s what Strong’s Concordance does.

The problem is that many people try to use Strong’s to get the MEANING of a word, and there are two problems with that. First, Strong’s simply doesn’t provide that. What it’s providing is a list of all the ways the KJV translates that particular word.So you’re not really getting meaning, you’re getting the KJV single-word-equivalent-in-translation. We call that a “gloss.” That’s not helpful, really.  You look up “kill,” it gives you ratsach, and lo, you learn “ratsach means kill.” You haven’t really learned anything. So Strong’s certainly doesn’t give you meaning. It doesn’t even give you current translational glosses.

The second problem is that even if Strong’s were providing modern translational-equivalents, modern glosses instead of KJV glosses 500 years old… that’s still not the “meaning” of the word, not in the fullest or most specific sense, anyway. Why not? Well, you can look up “father” and learn that it comes from Hebrew ‘ab. So, Hebrew ‘ab = English “father.” Great. Is that the “meaning”? Is it everything  ‘ab would convey to an Israelite? No. “Father” might well be the denotation of ‘ab, but that tells you nothing about the connotations, everything associated with it, its broader cultural usages. (As I illustrate at length in this post.)

So in a sense, it doesn’t matter how good your glosses are; by nature, a gloss simply can’t give you that kind of cultural/linguistic native information. For that, you need more specialized reference works (below). But it raises a third issue with Strongs, particularly with Hebrew and Aramaic.

In brief, in the Semitic languages— which include Hebrew, Aramaic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Arabic, and many others, mostly dead/classical— words are constructed from tri-consonantal root, and the meaning of that root can be modified through manipulating those three consonants in various ways. There are fixed and named patterns for these manipulations, particularly with verbs, e.g. qal, piel, hiphil, etc.  We call these patterns “stems” or binyanīm in Hebrew.

Often, putting the same root into a different stem results in a completely different English equivalent. For a noun example, putting an m- in front of a root tends to refer to the place or means by which that root is done.From the triconsontal root ZBḪ, ZaBaḪ is a verb meaning “to slaughter” ; MiZBeaḪ means “an altar” i.e. “a place of slaughter.” In English, “altar” and “slaughter” aren’t related, but in Hebrew quite closely and obviously so; we’ve just put the root into different patterns. LaMaD means to “learn” but LiMMēD means “to teach” (i.e. “to bring about a state of learning”) and Ta-LMuD means “instruction.” MeLeK is “king,” MaLKah is “queen”²-ah is a feminine marker, MaLaK means “to reign,”  hiMLīK means “to crown or install someone as king”³a causative stem, MaLKūT is “royalty.”

Put in layman’s terms, the same “word” can mean VERY different things depending on which pattern or “stem”/ binyan it’s in. The same root in a different stem is effectively an entirely different word; but Strong’s doesn’t treat it that way and most Hebrew lexicons assume that you’re actually studying Hebrew and know about stems.

So for example, one version of Strong’s lists these glosses for paqad, conflating all the stems into one; “to pay attention to, visit, appoint, avenge, muster, watch over, number, miss, charge, judge, count.” paqad doesn’t mean all these things everywhere at once— that’s a linguistic fallacy— and those are, again, glosses, not meaning per se.

I’ve seen LDS make this mistake, often by bloggers who don’t know the languages but have big followings. If you don’t understand about the way Hebrew and Aramaic work— if you don’t know about verbal stems!— you’re going to make real mistakes in trying to figure out what’s going on with these different Hebrew patterns, because you don’t know that changing the stem changes the meaning. It’s like handing a three-yr-old a loaded language gun.

So if you want actual MEANING, instead of glosses, you need something other than Strong’s. Each of these are available in Logos, and can be set up so that clicking on a word in your Bible opens up the resource directly to the corresponding Hebrew/Greek/Aramaic word.

1) Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary. This is relatively cheap, and was meant as a replacement and correction to strong’s. It’s still… minimal. And Evangelical. But if English is your only language, use this if you must use something. You’ll still need to use a version of Strong’s to figure out the Strong’s number of the word you’re looking for, turn to the index in Mounce, then turn to Mounce’s entry.  Mounce in Logos.

2) IF you have some money to spend, or access to a university library, the NIDOTTE/NIDNTTE series. Those stand for New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (and the NT equivalent. Five volumes and four volumes, respectively. There is also a Concise and cheaper version of the NT volumes, though I have no experience with this. ) They write essays on each word. It’s longer, a bit technical, but probably still accessible to someone willing to do some work. In Logos, you can go directly from an English word to the original language entry in these. They’re both on sale right now.

3) DA Carson, Exegetical Fallacies. This book explains a lot of common mistakes and assumptions people make when trying to work with the languages and interpreting. No real language expertise necessary though. Logos link

All of these can be purchased electronically through Logos, where all of the verse references are pop-ups, and it’s significantly easier to navigate.

Now, one final takeaway. Having said all this, if you ever spot someone declaiming authoritatively on the REAL meaning in GREEK of X in the New Testament… and then they cite Strongs? Run away. That’s a bright red flag that they have no idea what they’re talking about with the languages. Why? Because no one with any actual training uses Strong’s. It’s purely an amateur book, cheap and outdated.

What about learning the languages? BYU has good programs. I’ve loved doing it and so did Joseph Smith, who had about the equivalent of a semester of Hebrew. But not everyone has the time, desire, or (let’s be honest) capacity. Languages are hard. And you lose what you don’t use. I spent 10 minutes today with some Hebrew flashcards and practicing paradigms on a board, and reading a bit. My Greek is terribly rusty. My Arabic is almost entirely gone, ditto some of my other languages. Fortunately, much of the advantage of learning the languages can be gained from reading three or four different translations with different translation philosophies, and using the language tools I’ve described here.

Lastly, to emphasize again,  learning the *language* is not enough; strictly speaking, learning the languages just makes you a walking dictionary. In order to interpret scripture literally,  you also need all the cultural connotations which language itself and a dictionary of glosses simply cannot convey. These things are what give you knowledge of the “implicit contexts” of scripture, the topic of my next post.

This is post 2 in my series before we start the New Testament in January. Post 1 has my top 5 suggestions of useful books.

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here via GoFundMe. *I am an Amazon Affiliate, and may receive a small percentage of purchases made through Amazon links on this page. You can get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box below) and can also follow Benjamin the Scribe on Facebook.