How to Study Hebrew and Greek Words in the Bible (Without Getting It Wrong)

You have heard it from a pulpit, or read it in a comment thread: "In the original Greek, this word really means…" — and then something surprising, moving, and slightly too convenient.

Sometimes it is true. Often it is not. And the difference is almost never that the speaker knows Greek; it is that they know how to read a lexicon entry, or they do not.

Short answer: Strong's Concordance is an index, not a dictionary. The list of English words under each number is a list of the ways the King James translators rendered that word — not a set of meanings the word carries everywhere. Confuse the two and you will "discover" things the Bible never said. The fix is a method: check every other place the word appears, then say plainly how sure you are.

That is the whole article in four sentences. The rest is how to actually do it.

What Strong's Concordance really is

In 1890, James Strong and a team of more than a hundred collaborators published the Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. The goal was practical and mechanical: list every word of the King James Version, every place it appears, and tag it with a number pointing back to the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek behind it. Hebrew and Aramaic got numbers H1 to H8674; Greek, G1 to G5624. 🟢

That numbering is one of the great gifts to lay Bible study. It let a reader with no Hebrew at all ask a real question — is this the same word as over there? — and get a real answer.

But notice what Strong was building. He was indexing an English translation. The short gloss beside each number is a brief note, not a full definition, and the string of English words that follows it is a frequency list of KJV renderings. It answers "how did these translators handle this word?" It does not answer "what does this word mean here?"

Almost every bad word study in circulation comes from reading that list as if it were a definition.

The five mistakes

1. Treating the translation list as a definition

Scholars call this illegitimate totality transfer — a phrase from James Barr's 1961 book The Semantics of Biblical Language. The idea is simple: a word does not carry all of its possible meanings every time it is used. It carries one, chosen by the sentence around it. 🟢

Take the Hebrew chayil (H2428). Look it up and you get an intimidating spread: army, strength, wealth, valour, virtue, might. All accurate — the KJV really does render it all those ways. So when Proverbs 31:10 asks, "Who can find a virtuous woman?", it is tempting to pour the whole list in at once and preach a woman who is simultaneously an army, a fortune, and a moral standard.

The honest observation is quieter and better. In the book of Ruth, Boaz is introduced as a gibbor chayil, "a mighty man of wealth" (Ruth 2:1), and Ruth is called an eshet chayil, "a virtuous woman" (Ruth 3:11) — the same word, in the same book, applied to a wealthy landowner and to a penniless foreign widow. Whatever chayil is, Ruth has it without owning anything. That is worth a sermon. It is also actually there. 🟢

2. The root fallacy

This is the assumption that a word means the sum of its parts, or whatever its ancestor meant.

The favorite example is ekklesia (G1577), the New Testament word for "church." Break it apart and you get ek ("out of") plus a relative of kaleō ("to call") — so, the argument goes, the church is "the called-out ones." It preaches beautifully.

The problem is that Greek speakers in the first century were not hearing the parts. Ekklesia was the ordinary word for a civic assembly, and Luke uses it that way without blinking: in Acts 19:32 and 19:41 the ekklesia is a confused, rioting mob in Ephesus that nobody called out of anything. 🟢 The doctrine of a called-out people is thoroughly biblical — it just does not come from taking this word apart.

English does the same thing to us. "Nice" comes from the Latin nescius, "ignorant." Nobody thinks calling a person nice is an insult. Origin is not meaning. 🟢

3. Letting the lexicon outrank the context

A word's range is decided by a dictionary; its sense in one verse is decided by the sentence. When those two conflict, the sentence wins, every time.

The KJV itself proves the point in English. In Romans 1:13 Paul says he "was let hitherto" from visiting Rome — and let there means hindered, the exact opposite of how we use it now. No dictionary of modern English will rescue that verse. Only the context will. 🟢

4. Assuming one Hebrew word equals one English word

Languages do not map onto each other cleanly. One Hebrew word may need four English words depending on context, and four Hebrew words may all land on the same English one. When someone says "there is a word in Hebrew with no English equivalent," they are usually right — and that is normal, not mystical. It is true of most word pairs in most language pairs.

5. Building doctrine on a grammatical form

The most common version of this is the aorist fallacy: treating the Greek aorist tense as though it always means a single, once-for-all, point-in-time act. It does not. The aorist is the default, unmarked way to state that something happened; it says nothing by itself about how long it took. D. A. Carson catalogs this one, along with the root fallacy, in Exegetical Fallacies, and it remains the most confidently repeated error in popular preaching. 🟡

A five-step method that keeps you honest

None of this requires learning Hebrew. It requires a sequence.

1. Find the number. Use any interlinear or concordance tool to get the Strong's number for the specific word in the specific verse. Not the English word — the word underneath it.
2. Read the gloss, then set it down. Note the short definition. Treat it as a hypothesis you are about to test, not as the answer.
3. Read every other occurrence. This is the step that does the actual work, and the step almost everyone skips. If the word appears 40 times, read all 40 — quickly, in context. You are looking for the range, and for the outliers that break a tidy theory.
4. Check a real lexicon. Strong's tells you where; a lexicon tells you what. For Hebrew, the Brown-Driver-Briggs; for Greek, Thayer's. Both are old and public domain, both are far richer than a gloss, and both will show you a semantic range instead of a word list.
5. Say how sure you are. Then write it down honestly.

That last step is not decoration. It is the difference between a study and a slogan.

Why we mark everything 🟢 🟡 🔴

Every word study on this site carries one of three marks, and now you know why they exist:

• 🟢 Verifiable. You can check it yourself, in the text, with a concordance. Cross-references given.
• 🟡 Defensible but debated. Serious scholars disagree, or the evidence is suggestive rather than decisive.
• 🔴 Popular but unsupported. The claim circulates widely and the text does not carry it.

Most of the "original language" content online would be a page of 🔴 if anyone marked it. We would rather hand you a smaller number of things you can stand on.

What it looks like when the method works

Genesis 22:9 says Abraham "bound Isaac his son." The Hebrew verb is aqad (H6123) — and running step 3 on it produces something a gloss never would: the word appears exactly once in the entire Old Testament. Nowhere else. Hebrew has a perfectly common verb for tying someone up, asar, used dozens of times for prisoners; the writer did not use it here. He used the technical term for binding the legs of an animal already destined for the altar, and then never used it again. 🟢

That is why Jewish tradition calls the whole episode the Akedah — the Binding. The finding is not a clever reading of a definition; it is a count anyone can repeat. You can read the full study of that word, or browse the rest of the word studies.

And when you find something that survives all five steps, you will notice the feeling is different from the one a viral post gives you. It is quieter, and it holds.

We are assembling ninety of these — verse, Strong's number, root, cross-references, and a practice for each — into a Hebrew and Greek Word Study Workbook. In the meantime, the free downloads are the place to start, and a new word study goes up every day.