Hebrew and Aramaic and Translation, Oh My!

Let’s talk about the Old Testament languages and Bible translation for a bit. Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic are very different from English.

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First, as I recommend the  SBL Study Bible, I want to point out that it’s $1.99 on Kindle right now. I don’t like having to flip back and forth between translations and notes, but it’s hard to beat for $1.99 and it’s not in Logos yet.

Now. I caution people pretty strongly against playing with biblical languages unless they study them, with an especially strong (ha!) caution against using Strong’s Concordance to dig into the meaning of words. That’s not what it was for, and it will mislead you. Even people who study the languages can get too hung up on “dictionary” definitions, when what we really need to understand is “encyclopedia” definitions.

First, some Hebrew/Aramaic words do have meaning that is hard to convey in a single English word; but Strong’s won’t help you there! It doesn’t even provide meaning, merely translational-equivalents.  Instead I recommend two books from different perspectives.

1. Matthew Schlimm’s 70 Hebrew Words Every Christian Should Know (Amazon, Logos). I’ve previously recommended Schlimm’s This Strange and Sacred Scripture: Wresting with the Old Testament and Its Oddities (Amazon, Logos.)
2.  Joel Baden’s Lost in Translation: Recovering the Origins of Familiar Biblical Words (Amazon, Logos.)

Schlimm earned his PhD from Duke, speaks from a Methodist/Christian perspective, and teaches at a theological seminary. By contrast, Baden speaks from a (secular?) Jewish perspective. He was two years ahead of me at UChicago in Semitics, but transferred to Harvard for a PhD in Hebrew Bible, and now teaches at Yale Divinity School. ( I really appreciated Baden’s trenchant but accessible introduction to Source Criticism, which is coming in Logos.)

As Latter-day Saints are not typical Christians, we may sometimes find a scholarly or Jewish perspective will resonate more than a conservative Protestant perspective. But Baden will certainly surprise at times; he has an excellent little bit on the word “and” which functions much differently in Hebrew than English.  As another example, Baden concludes, through the very messy history of Levites that “what seems to have happened is that the profession, levite,  became understood as a tribal designation—Levite.” The history of Israelite ideas of priesthood pertain directly to the question of the Book of Mormon and Lehi offering sacrifice in the wilderness.

In any case, both Schlimm and Baden are very insightful and accessible to the average Latter-day Saint.

If you do insist on playing with the original languages or study them, a must-read is DA Carson’s little Exegetical Fallacies (Logos), though a new edition is coming in August 2026. To paraphrase Mosiah, there are so many ways to make mistakes in interpretation that I cannot number them all. Well, Carson does a good job trying 🙂

Studying the words alone is dangerous! See the video here (scroll down to Chapter 2 Lecture, “Word Study Can Be Dangerous.”)

Setting all that aside, what about translation itself? Translation is not a code. It’s not even about dictionaries. If you’d like to understand what makes translation difficult beyond the languages themselves, I recommend my paper from Religious Educator on Why Translations Differ and two books: Robert Alter’s Art of Bible Translation (Logos) and John Barton’s The Word: How We Translate the Bible and Why it Matters (Logos)

I’d also recommend Mark Ward’s excellent short book on the problems of KJV language (Amazon, Logos) and his YouTube channel talking about Bible translations and words. FWIW, Ward grew up KJV-Only, left that perspective as he earned (iirc) a PhD in biblical Greek, and remains a conservative Christian, employed at Logos.   Ward has also talked at length about Strong’s concordance (here) and what to use instead. He also has a video about this.

And here’s a short video of a translation committee for the ESV— a conservative Evangelical translation— debating “slave” vs “servant” vs “bondsman.” (FWIW, I’m strongly in the “slave” camp.)