I've been preaching since I was an adolescent. In that time I've had the chance to experiment with my style, tone, and content. For me, I enjoy variety. Mixing things up is good in some things, I think. However, I tend to have a pretty set method for annotating my sermon preparation. If you've taken a glance at any of my sermon notes (available here on pastorelionline.com by the way!), you'll notice I lean heavily into providing lots of biblical reference to back a point. Sometimes, I won't even use all of the texts in my actual preaching. However, most every sermon features some kind of word study. The keen eyed christian will notice that although I feature these exegetical tidbits in my sermons, I don't build the public speech around them. This is on purpose. Most pastor would argue that exegesis should be the basis of all biblical preaching, but if you know me, you already know what I'm going to say. It's not that simple. Let me explain.
The TLDR Version
Word studies in scripture are unreliable at scale because we're too far removed from the original authors' various and differing cultures and languages. Even though the Bible is composed of writings in only three languages, those languages are varied in use and style as well as in dialect. Few pastors are trained to recognize and account for this in their sermon study. Even fewer regular believers have any awareness of this. This is why Bible word studies are complicated.
Language and Distance
The Bible reaches across many topics and themes. Each of them are explored with different historical contexts and for different audiences. Naturally this means that the way the idea is presented will Now consider that the Bible authors range from priests to doctors to sea men to shepherds to Egyptian prince. I guarantee you they will not use language the same. Now remember that they're not even writing during the same periods of Human history. English may be one language on paper, but a state-side Yankee will have to re-learn how words work in the land down under (Australia). Even within the United states, in only 100 years, the American English of California has drifted very far from the English of the early 1900's deep south. It's not enough to find a dictionary of the language, you have to also account for dictionaries that focus on or distinguish the different periods of language use. The degree of change or variance from one use of language (this is nothing to say of the theology, the history, or the culture of the author, this is JUST language, just how they use the words on their own) to another use of language can be thought of as a separation in terms of distance.
I find this way of thinking about it helpful because it highlights that language and exegesis of Micah is not just different than something out of Genesis, it's super distant. They are far removed. you can not exegete a passage from both places without accounting for that distance. Think of a telescope or a camera focus, or even bi-focal lenses. Looking at two objects that are at wildly different distances will not be in focus suing the same instrumentation without intentional adjustments. Just try reading the sign across a street using reading glasses.
If you've made it this far, you might want to buckle up, this is going to be a long one.
The Shortcomings of Greek and Hebrew Bible Dictionaries
Let me show you a picture of what the average Bible dictionary looks like.
You'll notice that this dictionary leads with the Strong's concordance numbers and gives the possible meanings for each of the words. Or rather, more specifically, these are the 'lemmas' and not the actual words in the source text. Either way, the entries are terse and to the point.
Notice that 8064 is 'shamayim,' and states that he word is heaven, or sky. Notice also that it does not indicate the fact that the word shamayim is actually a plural form of the word shamei. Why might this be omitted? probably in the interest of time and ease of reading. Instead it lists the aramaic term next in 8065. This is the same word as in Hebrew, also with a plural ending, but now it's translated plural. No explanation. and the fact that it's in a different language is easy to miss if you're not looking for it.
Here's an example of shamayim in the wild.
In the Hebrew source text, I highlighted the words in yellow. See how the first yellow word and the last yellow word are the same? (ignore the cantillation markers) The middle word is actually also the same word but you won't find it in the previous screenshot. The pronunciation of the text in yellow is, "Ha-shamayim Vush-mey Ha-shamayim." You won't find vushmey in a hebrew dictionary because it's the singular form of heavens and it has the word "and" slapped in front. It's a whole smorgasbord. Literally, the source reads, "The skies and the sky of the skies."
In English this text reads, "Heaven and the highest heaven." The "Vush-mey Ha-shamayim" portion is rightly translated as highest heaven, or most high heaven, but you wouldn't know that from reading the dictionary. for that, you would need a theological or research lexicon.
The same goes for Greek
Now let's see what a theological lexicon looks like.
I switched to Greek here because the Hebrew lexicon entry for shamayim is massive. This is the Greek word for heaven as found in the New Testament only. Pretty big difference right? I didn't even bother trying to capture the rest of the entry. I LOVE my lexicons. It shows how many times and exactly where each instance of the word's meaning occur.
Things to note: this entry contains not just the dictionary author's perceived translation, but also the exact instances that the word is translated as such. You'll notice that instead of the Strong's numbers, the entries are Louw-Nida index numbers which are like Strong's but better and much more granular. Instead of one number for a word and all its possible meaning, the Louw-Nida numbers correspond to the actual variations in meaning for just one word. Very useful and clearly aimed at translators. The next thing to note is the sheer content. I chose the Greek entry because had I looked up the Hebrew lexicon, the screen capture wouldn't have only captured a small fraction of the lemma entry. Also notice near the bottom, it starts giving me the several forms I will find the original word in, as well as its declension or parsing.
This isn't to say, "Wow look at the amazing resource pastor eli has! wow, that's why we can trust him, he has the good books." Please no. Don't miss the point here. The point is that the tools we use for bible study don't just give us clearer answers as they scale up in cost and reliability. If anything, more and more training and practice go into learning how to use something like a theological research lexicon (which I haven't shown you here). it's so much raw data. The strength in a good bible study tool isn't in how it
And even then. Even then, this is so much information that without any training--formal or otherwise, this can get overwhelming fast. not to mention that the lexicon can only take you so far. Often you'll still miss figures of speech, grammatical patterns, etc. unless you know them already. And if you don't know them already, you may never bump into them.
Example:
Let's say I want to dig deeper into what "fear of the Lord" is. I could do everything right in terms of searching my resources and come to a wrong conclusion about what 'fear' means because it turns out that fear of the Lord is not four words, but rather one single idiom in ancient Hebrew. Unless you knew to look for it, the only other way to stumble upon it would be to brute force your way through every instance of the word fear in the Bible, and comb through and filter all instances of the word where it's not related to the phrase 'fear of the Lord.' Then you would compare the instances chronologically and then compare those to the uses of the word fear on its own, and THEN you could start putting together a fair idea of what 'fear of the Lord' might have meant to them. That could take you months! I know because it took me 6 months.
Friend, I want to say this in kindness because I want to encourage your study of the Bible rather than discourage you and make you stop. Even with all the added material per entry in a theological lexicon, interpretation of all that data requires a great deal of discernment. It's simply not for the faint of heart. If your reaction to biblical languages is to go cross-eyed, let's just be honest with ourselves--that may not be the route you should take in Bible study. There are other truths that can't be drawn out the bible via language studies. I believe that the Spirit can and does speak to you in life events and meaningful moments. If original language study is the brain of Bible study, personal practical application is the heart of it.
The Private Interpretation Problem
Even so, at some point, a level of trust has to exist between the Bible reader and the community of faith. Why? because no single person can uncover the entire Bible through responsible and well informed exegesis. The same way that no single expert in a field knows every topic with a maximum extent of profundity, no Bible scholar stands on unborrowed knowledge of scripture. No man is an island--as they say. The New Testament warns about this.
"Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."
1 Peter 1:20-21
I find it so ironic that Adventists like to refer to this verse to push the historicist view of Bible prophecy, yet show up to Sabbath school saying things like, "well to me that verse means...", or "we I've always taken that to mean..."
Like, we don't have time in this blog post to go over why prophecy in these two verses aren't strictly about prophecies alone, but common. If pseudoscience and science skepticism has taught me anything it's that leaving people to do their own research will always devolve into finding the most clicked on google result regardless of how true or verifiable it is. Are you catching what I'm saying? Research is not easy and it's not something I can responsibly conclude by scrolling my phone while in the bathroom. (looking at you gen z) *airhorn sounds* (for anyone over 40, that's an internet in-joke. don't worry about it).
Because no person can be an expert, and no expert can know everything, a community of faith allows for the ability to understand more about scripture. I can't say I've annotated every word in the ancient text, nor cross referenced it, but I can say that I'm able to trust the scholars putting together my most reliable Bible tools, my favorite lectionaries, my favorite search queries, everything that I can search up that I myself don't have the time or training to go digging for... all of that requires faith that someone else knew what they were doing and did a responsible job in doing that work so that I can have better access to the history and the beauty of Scripture. Why? Because my reading of the Bible isn't a black box. I'm not isolated in my understanding of scripture. I'm not a historian. I'm not an archeologist. I trust what I read from historians and archeologists that the Christian community (and in my case the Adventist community if I'm being picky) recognize as reliable. That's what it means to not have a private interpretation.
Bible Study for the Everyman (and woman)
Wow. So where does that leave us? Should we abandon our personal efforts and submit to whatever the consensus is on theology and interpretation? Ha! no. No, we should absolutely pursue a personal connection to scripture. If you are drawn to learning more about the words within the Word, please do! My plea is that you will avoid arrogance and remember that you are playing with a very complex puzzle.
Let us always walking humbly in our journey of trying to make sense of the Bible.
Stay Blessed
-pastor eli
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