The Original Languages of the Bible

Closely connected with the verbal system is the ubiquity of waw (?; “and”) in the Hebrew Bible. It is used to begin books with no previous connection with another narrative (e.g., Esther, Ezekiel, Jonah) and is the main particle connecting clauses in prose texts. Although Hebrew has some particles that carry senses such as “but,” “therefore,” and “because,” these words are less commonly used than waw, which in connection with various clauses can be rendered by a range of terms. The esv renders waw by the neutral “and” where appropriate, but also uses words such as “now” (Judg. 2:1), “so” (Judg. 2:14), “then” (Judg. 2:16), and “but” (Judg. 2:19) when the context calls for it.

Hebrew also has fewer prepositions than English, with the result that the same Hebrew preposition can be rendered in a variety of ways. For instance, renderings of the preposition b (??) may include “in,” “on,” “by,” and “with.” Hebrew has no word for “of,” but the possessive and other relationships expressed by English “of” can be represented in Hebrew by using the “construct state.” In the construct state, a noun is placed immediately before another noun in an inseparable (attached) position. Sometimes this involves a change in the form of the first noun as it loses stress. Thus, the underlined word is in the construct state in the following examples: melek (“king”) + yisra’el (“Israel”) ? <u>melek</u> yisra’el (“king of Israel”); malkah (“queen”) + yisra’el (“Israel”) ? <u>malkat</u> yisra’el (“queen of Israel”).

Hebrew has a definite article: h (?) precedes the noun, usually with a short a-vowel (?) and doubling of the initial consonant of the noun. There is no indefinite article in Biblical Hebrew. Thus melek means “king” or “a king,” but hammelek means “the king.” In poetic texts, however, the definite article is used more sparingly, and it is therefore sometimes legitimate to use a definite article in translating a Hebrew phrase that lacks one (as in the esv rendering “in the scroll of the book,” in Ps. 40:7).

Hebrew has two genders (masculine and feminine) and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural). The dual is used only to refer to two items that occur in a pair (e.g., “eyes,” “knees,” “teeth,” “millstones”). Verbs and pronouns also distinguish between a masculine and a feminine form of the second person (“you”) in singular and plural forms, and between a masculine and a feminine form of the third-person plural (“they”). The distinction between the genders of the pronouns plays a significant part in the esv identification of speakers in the Song of Solomon (see, e.g., esv footnote on Song 1:11).

The Hebrew of the OT is not uniform. Certain songs, such as the Song of Deborah (Judges 5) and the Song of Moses (Ex. 15:1–18), display archaic linguistic features. Though there is still a strong underlying linguistic unity to the OT, the language found throughout the 39 books shows that the OT was composed over a considerable period of time. Moreover, the language of the OT also reflects dialectal differences (cf. Judg. 12:6). Occasionally features of certain OT texts are identified by scholars as coming from the northern kingdom (Israel), as opposed to Judah, for example.

The term “Aramaic” comes from the people of Aram (an ancient region of upper Mesopotamia), the Arameans, whom Old Akkadian writings mention as early as the third millennium b.c. During the eighth and seventh centuries b.c., the Assyrian Empire controlled much of the ancient Near East, and Aramaic spread in usage as an international language (cf. 2 Kings 18:26; Isa. 36:11) until the Persian Empire of the sixth century b.c. established it as the official language. The few Aramaic sections of the OT (Gen. 31:47; Ezra 4:8–6:18; 7:12–26; Jer. 10:11; Dan. 2:4–7:28) fit clearly within the category of Imperial Aramaic, the language of Persian administration. Much of the grammatical description of Biblical Hebrew given above could, with minor changes, also apply to Aramaic. Eventually, Aramaic came into daily use with many Jews, especially those in Galilee. Aramaic words appear in the NT on the lips of Jesus (e.g., Mark 5:41; 7:34), and the name Golgotha (Mark 15:22) is Aramaic in form. The term of respectful address, ’abba’, seems also to be Aramaic, but it became standard in later Hebrew as well. The expression ephphatha (“be opened!” Mark 7:34) may be Aramaic, though some think it is the equivalent form in Hebrew. Paul uses the Aramaic expression marana tha (“our Lord, come!”) in 1 Corinthians 16:22.

While Biblical Hebrew enjoyed over 1,000 years of existence as a spoken language—from the middle of the second millennium b.c. until the close of the b.c. era—it has never truly “died” but continues to thrive today through the perpetual study and translation of the writings of the OT Scriptures. Furthermore, it is still actively spoken and used in Jewish religious life and synagogues around the world. It is taught and passed down in both Christian seminaries and Jewish yeshivas. And because of its use by God as the language of the OT, it will continue to enjoy a detailed preservation and rich textual tradition virtually unparalleled by any other ancient language.

Starting in May of 334 b.c., Alexander, the 21-year-old king of Macedon, led his victorious army through four pitched battles, two sieges, and innumerable smaller engagements that enabled him to conquer territory that now goes under the names of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Reaching the banks of the Beas River in Pakistan, he reluctantly turned back as his exhausted troops threatened mutiny. Three years later, in 323 b.c., he died (at age 32) in Babylon, just as he was planning an expedition all the way from Egypt along the North African coast to the Atlantic.

When Alexander died, his empire broke up into separate kingdoms headed by his disgruntled generals. But he had changed the world. In the old, now liberated cities of Asia Minor—Ephesus and Pergamum—as well as in the newly founded cities of the Middle East—Antioch and Alexandria—the culture and language of the colonial aristocracy was Greek. Three centuries after Alexander’s death, when the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth was written down, the language used was not Jesus’ native Aramaic but Greek, which, thanks to Alexander’s conquests, had become the common language of the Mediterranean world. The conclusion now universally accepted by philologists is that the Greek of the NT, in all essential respects, is the vernacular Koine of the first century a.d., the language of the Roman imperial period.

“Koine” means “common” in the sense of pertaining to the public at large. Hence, “Koine Greek” means the language commonly spoken everywhere—the basic means of communication of people throughout the Roman Empire. This dialect was basically the late Attic vernacular, spoken in Athens, with dialectal and provincial influences. In addition to the Greek NT, the Koine has left other literary monuments that are invaluable sources of light on the sacred text, including papyri, inscriptions, the writings of numerous Jewish and early Christian authors, and above all the Septuagint, the ancient version of the OT that became the Bible of the early church and was used extensively by the NT writers.

Koine Greek itself exhibits three important characteristics. The first, semantic change, is a natural feature of any language. The meanings of certain words were weakened in the Koine period. For example, the noun doma meant “house” or “room” in Classical Greek, but in the NT it came to mean “roof” of a house (Luke 5:19). In the NT the preposition eis can mean “in” as well as “into,” though it meant only “into” in Classical Greek. The conjunction hina has a much wider meaning in Koine than “in order that,” which was the meaning in Classical Greek. For instance, hina is often used in content clauses simply to mean “that.” The tendency in Koine to use the comparative degree of the adjective for the superlative may also be noted. Second, Koine Greek exhibits greater simplicity than Classical Greek. This is seen primarily in the composition of its sentences, which tend toward coordination rather than subordination of clauses. Finally, Koine Greek shows unmistakable traces of a tendency toward more explicit (some would say more redundant) expression, as seen, for example, in the use of pronouns as subjects of verbs and the use of prepositional phrases to replace simple cases. Adverbs abound, as do parenthetical statements and emphatic expressions such as “each and every” and “the very same.”

At the same time, Koine Greek was not entirely uniform. Various literary levels existed, depending on the writer’s background, education, or even sources. In the first century a.d., some writers even attempted to turn back the clock by advocating a return to the old classical form of Greek, decrying the Koine as a debased form of the language. The artificial style they produced (called “Atticistic” Greek) contrasted with the dialect of everyday life.

The NT itself reveals several styles of Greek among its authors. The highly literary epistle to the Hebrews, with its careful progression of argument and elevated diction, lies at one extreme. Luke and Acts also reveal good literary style, though the author (Luke) is able to vary his style considerably (cf. the colloquial Greek of Peter’s speech in Acts 15:7–11 with the rhetorical nature of Paul’s Areopagus speech in Acts 17:22–31, or the Classical introduction in Luke 1:1–4 to the more Septuagintal style of Luke 1:5–2:52). Paul’s Greek is more or less colloquial, but that may be partly due to his amanuenses, the secretaries who wrote from his dictation. At the other end of the spectrum lies the grammar of Revelation, which may reflect the work of a Semitic-speaking person who lacks a polished knowledge of Greek (though many of the idioms John uses have direct parallels in colloquial papyri texts).

Greek linguistics has emerged as one of the most fundamental disciplines in biblical studies—as important, e.g., as the study of molecular physics in the natural sciences. Biblical scholars have recently become concerned with the problems of language to a degree equaled only in the early history of modern comparative linguistics, when NT scholars such as Deissmann and Moulton began demolishing the myth of “Holy Ghost” Greek (the belief that God created a special language in which to inscripturate the NT). Today several scholars are specifically interested in what they call the “semantics of biblical language.”

It is a central concern of semantics that a clear distinction be maintained between words as linguistic units and the concepts associated with them. All languages have several ways of expressing a concept, and rarely does a concept consist of only one word. This confusion of word and concept is one of the chief faults of Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. In treating words as if they were concepts, it incorrectly implies that the words themselves contain the various theological meanings assigned to them. But the meanings of words are determined from the way they are used in context. There is now consensus that interpreters must work at the level of the paragraph to discern meaning.

The capacity of a word to have two or more meanings is technically known as polysemy—a particular form of a word can belong to different fields of meaning, only one of which need be its semantic contribution to a single sentence or context. The principle of polysemy is frequently ignored in exegesis, leading to what is called the fallacy of “illegitimate totality transfer,” which occurs when the various meanings of a word in different contexts are gathered together and then all those meanings are presumed to be present in any single context. For example, it would be illegitimate to presume without further indication that in any single passage the word ekklesia must refer to the church, the body of Christ. In Acts 7:38, e.g., “church” (in the NT sense) would clearly not be the author’s meaning and would actually be contradictory to the sense of the passage.

Another important linguistic concept is synonymy. Synonymy can be considered the opposite of polysemy: in synonymy, two or more words may be associated with the same meaning, whereas in polysemy two or more meanings are associated with the same word. A biblical example of synonymy involves the Greek vocabulary for “love.” The relationship between the meanings of agapao and phileo is such that the words may be used interchangeably in some contexts. One thereafter need not be surprised that agapao (popularly considered to refer to divine love) can describe Amnon’s incestuous relationship with his half-sister Tamar (2 Sam. 13:15 lxx) or that phileo (popularly taken to refer to a lower form of love) can refer to the Father’s love for the Son (John 5:20). Other NT examples of synonymy are logos/rhema (“word”), horao/blepo (“I see”), and oida/ginosko (“I know”). In each case, according to the principle of “semantic neutralization,” any of the terms in these pairs may in some contexts be used interchangeably without any significant difference in meaning, depending on the purpose of the biblical author. (Smaller differences in nuance or connotation, however, are often still present among synonyms.)

Greek is a highly inflected language (like its contemporary, Latin). This means that most Greek words undergo changes in keeping with their function in the sentence in which they occur. For example, Greek nouns have five basic cases (or sets of forms): nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, and accusative. (English still bears a faint resemblance to this trait in such words as “dog,” “dogs,” “dog’s,” and “dogs’,” or in “I” and “he” used as subjects, “me” and “him” used as objects, and “my” and “his” used to show possession.) Because Greek word inflections designate the function of each word in its sentence, Greek allows much more variation in word order than English does, e.g., where a different word order often changes the meaning. In addition, Greek verbs function within an extensive and highly developed system of tenses, voices, moods, gender, and number, giving modern Greek students considerable consternation, but providing flexibility for a very broad range of nuances of meaning. Koine Greek’s linguistic stock (the set of words available for use) was incredibly rich, and new words could easily be coined by combining older words or adding a variety of common prefixes. These features all made Koine Greek a wonderfully resourceful language with a remarkable ability to express an author’s meaning precisely and understandably.

Is this ancient language worth studying today? Yes, indeed! The many tools available can give modern readers the knowledge and understanding to incorporate Greek into their own life and ministry, and into their personal Bible study. A knowledge of Greek will probably not make a reader think that the meaning of a verse is completely different from that indicated in a reliable, essentially literal modern translation, but it will certainly give the reader the ability to understand the meaning more precisely, to decide more accurately among various nuances that might be allowed by the English text, to understand why many popular interpretations are incorrect, and to have deeper confidence in knowing the precise sense of the verse. Meanwhile, those who will never learn Greek can still be thankful for scholars who have studied it extensively and who have prepared modern English translations that make available to the reading public an accurate rendering of what the original says.