A Simple and Legitimate Use for a Concordance Indexed to the Biblical Languages
I should just call the title a post and go on! But I won’t.
The title and post came to me as I read Stupid Bible Tricks #1, and empathized. I recall one occasion when a speaker who was aware that i read Greek, and knew I had my Greek testament in front of my while listening, announced that “Henry would know” that he was right when he said that a particular Greek verse consisted of just four words, and then said them. The verse in question consisted of more than four words, and to the extent I could follow his pronunciation, none of the ones he indicated were in it.
That reminded me of some of the interesting things that can result from too little knowledge. The key, of course, is knowing what you know and conversely what you don’t. Then you can talk about what you know, or indicate that you don’t but you’ve heard, or something similar.
The second thing that lead to this post was my wife asking me whether there were different words in Hebrew for “sin” and “iniquity.” A bit of clarification showed that she understands the two very similarly in English and was wondering about what might lie behind them. For the answer to the simpler question, however, I pointed to her Kohlenberger The NIV Exhaustive Concordance which she uses with her NIV, and noted that she could discover the answer to such things in there. (I did this after I answered the question.)
Now I have written before about the dangers of word studies. There is simply no substitute for actually knowing a language if you are going to comment on it. But for certain simple answers, such a concordance can be useful. Bible software, such as Logos, can be even more useful, but that is another post or several.
To get the answer to my wife’s question, on can simply go to the entry for “iniquity,” check the verse in question, get the word number, and look it up in back. Why go to this trouble? On the list in the back one will find out all the English words that the NIV has used to translate that particular Hebrew word, in this case quite a number. Perusing that list will give you some idea of the semantic range of the word, though not nearly what you would get from a good lexicon.
Again, this is no substitute for actually knowing the language, but it is