How to define stuff in the Bible

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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