One of the most overlooked areas of Bible study is often the idea of “word study.” The Bible was not originally written in English. We have sections in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. In order to do a word study you do not have to be fluent in these languages; you simply need to learn how to use the tools that are available to you. It is important to do word studies because sometimes the meaning of a word cannot fully be expressed in the English language. Also, the meaning of the word in English may have changed somewhat since your translation was published. Engaging in word studies will give you a much more full understanding of a text.

When it comes to word studies, all words are not created equal.  You could spend so much time going through every single word in the text that you don’t have time to study anything else! Use common sense when deciding which word to study. For instance you don’t need to look up every occurrence of “the” or “and.” Pay attention to words that are affecting the text. Here are some examples of words to study.

• Proper nouns-Sometimes names of people or places will have meanings that play a special part in the text; be sure to familiarize yourself with these.
• Nouns-Especially if a noun is the subject of the sentence, we need to understand exactly what is being referred to.
• Verbs-Understanding the actions that are taking place in a verse is fundamental to comprehension sometimes.
• Keywords-Anytime a keyword from the book is used in the verse you are analyzing you should be sure to know the full meaning.

Our example in this article is going to be Romans 1:16-17 (NASU):

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.”

Remember, we don’t need to look up every single word; we want to choose carefully which words are vital to the understanding of the verses.

Here is an example of the words I might choose to study:

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.”

You may choose to study more or fewer words in the verse depending on how much time you have to spend. You will also notice that I did not select any words in the quotation at the end to study. This is because this is a quotation from the Old Testament, which was penned in Hebrew. If you’d like to discover more information on these words you will need to discover where the quotation originated (a good cross reference or notes in your Bible can tell you this). Then you will need to do the word study in the Hebrew language.

Now that we have decided which words we will look into, it is time to define the words. There are many sources you can use to find the original language definition of these words. The easiest one, in my opinion, is www.blueletterbible.org. (If you rather the less technological path, use a Strong’s Concordance) Because of this, I will be giving you step-by-step instructions from this site.

Step-by-step guide:  

• Go to www.blueletterbible.org
• In the “Bible/Dictionary Search” box, type the verse you’d like to study (in our example, Romans 1:16-17).
• Make sure KJV is selected in the “Version” box in order to be able to use all available features, then click “Search.”
• You will now see a list of verses: the one you typed and all surrounding verses. Find your verse. You will notice six boxes to the side of each verse that say “K,” “C,” “L,” “I,” “V,” and “D.”  Click on “C.” This will bring you to the Lexicon/ Concordance for the verse you selected.
• At this point you should be looking at a chart with the English word, Strong’s number, root form, and a tense button (if applicable). Click on the Strong’s number for the word you’d like to study.
• You will now see a definition based on the Biblical usage, Vine’s Dictionary (if it’s a Greek word), and Thayer’s or Gesenius’s lexicon (depending on the original language).

Now we will look up the words we chose in the first section to get a better understanding of how they are used.

Romans 1:16-17 (NASU):

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.”

• Ashamed: to be ashamed
• Gospel: glad tidings of salvation through Christ
• Power: power residing in a thing by virtue of its nature
• Salvation: deliverance from molestation of enemies
• Believes: to place confidence in or trust
• Righteousness: the character or quality of being right or just
• Revealed: to uncover or lay open what has been veiled or covered up
• Faith: conviction, assurance or guarantee

While some of these definitions were obvious, some can tell us about the verse that we may not have known before. For instance, the word “power” means “power residing in a thing by virtue of its nature.” This tells us that the gospel itself has an inherent power all its own. Also, if you paid attention to the actual Greek word, DYNAMIS, you may have noticed it looks a lot like our word dynamite. It is, in fact, where we get the word dynamite from (the connection can be confirmed by simply looking in the Merriam-Webster dictionary). We can better understand from this the sheer magnitude of the power Paul is referring to here.

Once you have determined the definition of each word, it is then a good idea to look up other instances of this word to discover more information about it. Let’s use the word “salvation” found in our example. Follow the above “Step-by-Step Guide.” Once you have reached the page about the specific word you are wishing to look up (in our case “salvation”), scroll down to see the list of times this word is used in scripture. Start with the word in the context of the book, then explore the word in the context of this author and then see how other authors use the word. When we look up “salvation” in the context of Romans, here are some of the things we find.

Salvation (in the context of Romans):

• Rom 1:16-the gospel=salvation
• Rom 1:16-extended to the Jew first and then the Greek
• Rom 10:1-Paul prays for the salvation of the Jews—it is his “heart’s desire”
• Rom 11:11-Salvation is offered to the Gentiles because of the Jews’ transgression

You can continue in a similar fashion for the rest of Paul’s writings and then for the rest of the scripture. Once you have examined the definition and the context of words in this way, you will have a much better idea of what a passage is really trying to say. The more we understand the specifics of scripture, the better we can then apply it to our lives.

*Note:  It should be said that I do not endorse all of the information on blueletterbible.org. It is simply the easiest free resource available when using this method of study.

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Kristy Huntsman

Kristy is Come Fill Your Cup's Editor-in-Chief. She is the author of Sanctified (A Study of 1st and 2nd Peter) , Redeemed (A Study of Hosea), and Appointed (A Study of Judges & Ruth) . Kristy and her husband, Lance live in Stonewall, OK where they attend the Stonewall Church of Christ. Kristy is a stay-at-home-mom who homeschools their two daughters Taylor and Makayla.

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