Studying Words

Biblical writers often have favorite ways of saying things. By looking closely at how often a word is used by a particular author and in what context(s) that word appears, we can learn things about the particular text we are studying and the meaning of the larger document in which the text appears.  

What a Word Study Is Not

A word study is not…

…just looking the word up in a dictionary or lexicon.

By "word study," I mean more than looking up the word in a lexicon. A Greek-English lexicon, for example, will give you the range of meaning of a Greek word in English, but it will not tell you much about the meaning of the word you are studying in the context in which you are reading it, and using a lexicon is not the best way to study how a particular author uses a word.

…just counting the number of times a word appears.

Many people new to a concordance are fascinated by the way it makes word counts so easy. For instance, a glance at the concordance will tell you that the word for "gospel" (euangelion [Kohlenberger #2295] What's this?) is used only a few times in the gospels themselves, but appears dozens of times in the letters of Paul. This is interesting. It is certainly something to look at more deeply, but if you stop here, you have only a factoid; you do not yet have a word study.

…just listing the occurrences of a word in a particular book.

A list of occurrences is the raw material for a word study. During a word study, you take that raw material, page through the Bible, read the word in many contexts, and draw conclusions about the meaning and significance of a particular instance of the word based on information gleaned from all that research.

What a Word Study Is

A word study combines attention to all of the things mentioned above, but it is more than any one of them alone. In a word study, you research all of these things: (1) the dictionary meanings of a word, (2) the way it is used in various contexts within the New Testament, and (3) how the specific author you are reading makes use of the word.

Why go to all this trouble? Word studies facilitate two kinds of discoveries about the New Testament. First, you do these things in order to have a basis for your judgment about what the word means as it is used in the specific text you are studying. In other words, as you read the Bible, you are deciding what your text means, and to do that, you need to know some things about how words in your text communicate meaning in various contexts.

What is a word study?
In general, a word study is a close look at several New Testament contexts within which a word is used in order to describe more fully what that word means in one particular context.

Secondly, word studies are a way to research various topics in the New Testament. You may want to find out more about prayer in the life of Jesus. You could start to learn about that topic just by looking at the occurrences of words for praying in the gospels. Or you want to know what Paul means when he says, "The Day of the Lord," so you look up all uses of "day" in Paul's letters and read those texts to help you fill in content for a theological concept.

Desired Results for Studying Words Unit

Each Into the New Testament unit has been designed to foster enduring understandings as well as key knowledge and key skills. Here are the learning goals for Comparing Similar Texts. (Here's more about the pedagogical theory behind Into the New Testament.)

Enduring Understandings

1. Word study does not mean word count.
2. Key words are not always explicitly theological or technical.
3. Exegesis requires deciding what information to disregard.
4. The exegetical skills you're learning aren't done in isolation from each other.

Essential Questions

1. So what? Is what I am finding out important? How do I know?
2. How do the skills I'm learning fit together?

Key Knowledge

1. Sample criteria for regarding a word as "key" (e. g. the word is repeated, central to the argument, an author's favorite, has specialized meaning for an author).
2. A working definition of word study as "a careful look at multiple New Testament contexts within which the same word is used in order to describe more fully what that word means in one particular context."

Key Skills

1. Integrate exegetical tasks: e.g. compare translations & compare similar texts as part of completing a word study.
2. Go beyond data-gathering to analysis when using a concordance.
3. Use a lexicon alongside a concordance, rather than using either in isolation.

Resource Pages on this Skill

Studying Words | This is the introductory page you are reading right now.

Which Words Are Key Words? | What words should you study in depth? This page offers a few suggestions for how to decide what words in a passage call for further research.

How To Find Word Occurrences | This page lists a step-by-step approach for working with Kohlenberger to find occurrences of a Greek word, whether you can read Greek or not. It also introduces Bibleworks as a word search tool. Bibleworks is a software package available to Luther Seminary students both on library and lab computers and available on the student's home computer if they have a Homelab account.

Next: Which Words are Key Words?