How to define stuff in the Bible

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To find out the meaning of a word, a person normally looks it up in a Webster's Dictionary. However, we can't trust a normal dictionary to define

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Bible words. Why not? If you look up the word baptize in a modern English dictionary, it will tell you the word means immersion, sprinkling, or pouring.

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Like other words in the English language, baptize has taken on different meanings over the centuries.

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The Greek word, as it was used in the day when the Bible was written, meant only to immerse. The key to understanding

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Bible words is to find out what the words meant to the people who lived during the time when the Bible was written.

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Only when we understand what the words meant back then can we figure out how to apply them to our own situation today.

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To properly define a word from the Bible, you'll need a dictionary of Old and New Testament words. These dictionaries are edited by scholars of the ancient biblical languages and are reliable for defining

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Bible words. Vine's dictionary is one of the easier ones to use. Let's look up the word warn as an example.

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Like an English dictionary, Vine's is alphabetical, so using it should come naturally. When you find the word, you'll see that it lists every

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Greek word that's translated as the English word warn. Each Greek word is spelled in English, followed by the

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Greek spelling, along with its strongs number. As you can see, there are three Greek words translated using the single

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English word warn. If you've already looked up the word using a strong's concordance, you'll be able to zero in on the specific

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Greek word you are looking for. Other dictionaries, such as Thayer's, are not listed alphabetically, but instead are sorted numerically by strong's number.

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Either way, you'll be able to find the word you're looking for if you use a strong's concordance as a reference. There are online resources that will give you the same information as the hardcopy dictionaries.

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There are also apps for mobile devices that provide these same resources. To truly understand the meaning of a word in the

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Bible, you must determine what it meant in the time period in which the text was written. A good