Strong's Numbers and Lexicons

The anchor for this lesson comes from the Old Testament, in Hebrew, and that is deliberate. The psalmist does not lack scripture. He has the law in front of him and calls it 'Your law'. What he asks for is sight: 'Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from Your law.' The Hebrew verb behind 'open', in the phrase גַּל־עֵינַי (gal-ʿênay, uncover my eyes), is the ordinary word for uncovering something, as one draws back a cloth. The psalmist assumes the wonders are already there in the text. What is covered is his eyes.

That is the right posture for this lesson, which is about tools that put a great deal of information about words in your hand. Strong's numbers and lexicons will tell you what a Greek word is, where else it appears and what senses it carried in the ancient world. They will not open your eyes. A student can learn every tool in this module and still read without seeing, and a believer with no Greek at all can see the wonders of the law because God has uncovered his eyes. The tools serve the prayer; they never replace it. It is worth beginning each study session with the psalmist's words, and meaning them.

The same verse also shows why the tools matter. Notice that the Hebrew word for 'wondrous things' and the verb for 'open' have their own entries in a Hebrew lexicon, and their own Strong's numbers, exactly as Greek words do. Strong's system covers the whole Bible: Hebrew and Aramaic words carry numbers beginning with H, and Greek words carry numbers beginning with G. Everything this lesson teaches about Greek works the same way when you look up a word in the Old Testament.

James Strong (1822-1894) was an American Methodist scholar who taught at Drew Theological Seminary. In 1890 he published The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, a vast index listing every word of the King James Version and every verse in which it appears. To tell the reader which original word stood behind each English word, Strong gave every Hebrew and Aramaic word, and every Greek word, a number, and printed short dictionaries of those words at the back. The Hebrew numbers run to 8674 and the Greek numbers to 5624. A number of Greek numbers were never used, and you will occasionally find a gap.

The numbers follow the alphabetical order of the words in the original language. G1 is Α (alpha), the first letter, used as a word in 'I am the Alpha and the Omega'. G863 is ἀφίημι (aphiēmi, to let go, leave, forgive). G864 is ἀφικνέομαι (aphikneomai, to reach, to come abroad), which has nothing to do with forgiving; it sits next door only because its spelling begins the same way. So a Strong's number is a filing label, like a library shelf mark. It tells you which word you are looking at and lets you find every other place that word occurs. It carries no meaning in itself, and two numbers close together tell you nothing about any relationship between the words.

That simple function is the reason the system has survived for well over a century. It lets a reader who knows no Greek go from an English word in the KJV to the Greek word beneath it and then to every other verse where that same Greek word appears, which is the foundation of any honest word study. Blue Letter Bible, STEP Bible and nearly every other free tool use Strong's numbers for exactly that purpose. When you tap a word in the interlinear from lesson 1, the number is what takes you to its lexicon entry and its list of occurrences.

The numbers have three limits worth knowing. First, Strong built them on the KJV and the Greek text behind it, the Textus Receptus. A few words in modern critical texts do not appear in that text, and tools handle them in different ways. Second, the counts differ between Greek texts. Blue Letter Bible reports that ἀφίημι occurs 146 times in the Textus Receptus and 143 times in its mGNT; neither number is wrong, because they count different printed texts. When you report how often a word occurs, say which text you counted. Third, one number sometimes covers what are really two words with the same spelling, or the same name borne by several people. STEP Bible uses what it calls extended Strong's numbers, which add a letter to split such cases, so do not be surprised to see G2424 in one tool and a longer label in another.

Strong's short dictionary definitions are a different matter from his numbers. They are brief, often only a few words, and they finish with a list of the ways the KJV rendered the word. Those definitions are handy for a first look and should never be the last. They were written in the nineteenth century, they are shaped by the KJV's English, and they sometimes lean on a word's supposed origin rather than its use. Use the number freely. Treat the dictionary entry as a starting point.

A lexicon is a dictionary of an ancient language built from that language's texts. A good one does not simply tell you what a word means. It sorts the places a word is used into groups of related senses, gives a definition or gloss for each group, and lists the passages where each sense is found. The free tools give you several lexicons, and each has its own date, purpose and limits. Lesson 3 of the Hermeneutics module The Toolbox has already named the main ones and set out a method for word studies; what follows adds what a Greek student needs to know about each.

Joseph Henry Thayer's A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, first published in 1886, is on Blue Letter Bible in full. Thayer was an American scholar who taught at Harvard, and his lexicon was a translation and revision of a Latin lexicon by the German scholar C. L. W. Grimm. It is thorough, it is in the public domain, and it is a real lexicon, with senses sorted and passages listed. It is also dated. Thayer wrote just before the great discoveries of everyday Greek papyri in Egypt, the letters, contracts, receipts and wills that showed scholars how ordinary people actually used many New Testament words. The German scholar Adolf Deissmann did much to make that evidence known, and James Hope Moulton and George Milligan collected it in The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, issued in parts from 1914 to 1929. Thayer could not use that evidence, so where his entries say a word is peculiar to the Bible or to Christian Greek, check the claim. A number of such words later turned up in the papyri.

STEP Bible offers two Greek lexicons in its side panel when you tap a word. The one it shows under Meaning is a brief lexicon prepared by Tyndale House, based mainly on G. Abbott-Smith's A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922), filling gaps from other works. Abbott-Smith wrote after the first papyri discoveries and drew on them, which makes his short entries a valuable check on Thayer. STEP also gives entries from Liddell, Scott and Jones, the great lexicon of classical Greek usually called LSJ. LSJ covers Greek from Homer onward, so it shows you how a word was used across a thousand years. That breadth is its strength and its risk: it can tell you that a word once meant something in the fifth century BC that no first-century reader would have heard in it.

Blue Letter Bible also links to dictionaries for English readers, such as W. E. Vine's Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, first issued in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Vine's is widely loved and often helpful, but it is not a lexicon in the strict sense. It is organised by English word, and its explanations sometimes rest on etymology in ways later scholarship would not accept. Read it as a pastor's notes, not as a final authority.

The standard scholarly lexicon of New Testament Greek is not free. Its name is usually shortened to BDAG, after Bauer, Danker, Arndt and Gingrich: it began as Walter Bauer's German lexicon, was translated and revised by William Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich in 1957, and its third English edition, edited by Frederick William Danker, appeared in 2000. Danker's edition did something earlier lexicons rarely did: for many words it gives a definition, a sentence describing the sense, before it gives English glosses, so the reader learns what the word refers to rather than only how to translate it. The New Testament scholar John A. L. Lee showed in A History of New Testament Lexicography (2003) that lexicons have often passed glosses down from one edition to the next with too little fresh checking, which is one reason Danker's change mattered. Another important paid lexicon, by Johannes Louw and Eugene Nida (1988), arranges words by fields of meaning rather than alphabetically. You will meet both names in commentaries. You can do sound work without either, provided you use the free lexicons with their dates in mind and let the passages themselves have the last word.

Take ἀφίημι, the verb from section 2, and look at four verses. In the Lord's Prayer, ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν (aphes hēmin ta opheilēmata hēmōn, forgive us our debts) asks God to forgive (Matthew 6:12). When Jesus calls the fishermen, ἀφέντες τὰ δίκτυα (aphentes ta diktya, leaving the nets) they 'left their nets and followed Him' (Matthew 4:20). At the Jordan, after Jesus speaks, the text says τότε ἀφίησιν αὐτόν (tote aphiēsin auton, then he lets him), which the BSB renders 'Then John permitted Him' (Matthew 3:15). And in Mark 1:34 Jesus 'would not allow the demons to speak'. In the SBLGNT, which this track quotes, all four use the same verb.

Blue Letter Bible's outline of usage for this word groups its senses under three main heads: to send away, which includes letting go of a debt and so forgiving it; to permit or allow; and to leave or go away from someone. That is a range. A good lexicon lays out the range so that you can see which sense fits which passage. It does not mean that every occurrence carries every sense, and it does not hand you one meaning to read into every verse. In Matthew 4:20 the disciples left their nets; nobody thinks they forgave them. In Matthew 6:12 the petition is for debts to be forgiven; it is not a request that God leave our debts lying where they are. Context chooses the sense, every time.

This is how all language works, including your own. The English word 'run' means one thing in 'run a race', another in 'run a business' and another in 'my nose is running'. No speaker of English hears all three senses at once, and a dictionary that listed 'run' with a single meaning would be a bad dictionary. A Greek lexicon is the same. When you open one, you are not looking for the meaning of the word. You are looking at a map of where the word has been, so that you can see which part of the map your verse stands on.

Sometimes the map is thin. The word behind 'accurately handles' in 2 Timothy 2:15, from the last lesson, appears once in the New Testament. A lexicon can then do only three things: cite its use elsewhere in Greek, such as the two Septuagint verses Thayer lists; describe how its parts were formed; and judge what fits the sentence. The last two are educated guesses, and the honest lexicons say so. When a lexicon entry is long and confident about a word used once, read it with more caution, not less.

There is also a trap on the other side. The KJV translation count on a Blue Letter Bible entry lists the English words the KJV used for a Greek word, with how many times each was used. For ἀφίημι it lists leave, forgive, suffer, let, forsake and others. That list is about the KJV, not about Greek. 'Suffer' appears there fourteen times because in 1611 English it could mean to allow, as in 'Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me' (Matthew 19:14, KJV). A student who read the count as a list of meanings would conclude that the Greek word has something to do with suffering pain. It never does. Use the count to see how one translation handled the word. Use the lexicon to see how Greek speakers used it.

On Blue Letter Bible, tapping a Strong's number opens a long page. At the top you will find the word itself, a transliteration and a pronunciation, its part of speech and a line about its origin, often labelled as the root word or etymology. Further down come Strong's own short definition, the KJV translation count, an outline of biblical usage that sorts the word's senses into numbered heads, the full entry from Thayer's lexicon, and finally the concordance: every verse where the word occurs, in the text you chose. The headings may move as the site is updated; look for those pieces.

Read the page in a particular order. Start with the concordance, not the definitions. Scroll through the verses and read several in your own translation, noticing the English words used. Then read the outline of usage and Thayer's entry to see how the senses are sorted, and test the sorting against the verses you have just read. Last, and with the most caution, read the etymology line. Lesson 5 of this module explains why: the history of a word's parts is the least reliable guide to what it means in any given sentence.

On STEP Bible, tap the word in the text and the side panel opens. The Meaning section gives the brief Tyndale House entry based on Abbott-Smith, with a short gloss and sometimes a note on usage. A separate section gives the LSJ entry for those who want the whole history of the word. Look also for the list of related words, and for a way to search for every occurrence. Comparing Thayer on one tool with Abbott-Smith on the other is one of the simplest checks you can make. If two lexicons written thirty-six years apart, one before and one after the papyri, agree about a word, you can lean on it. If they disagree, you have found something to investigate.

Keep your notes in a fixed form, so that you can compare words and check your work later. For each word write the lemma in Greek, its transliteration, its Strong's number, the text you counted in and the number of occurrences, the senses the lexicons list, and finally the sense you judge fits your verse, with one sentence saying why. That last sentence is the one that matters most, because it is where you show your reasoning, and where a teacher or a fellow student can test it.

Return to the passage you chose in lesson 1. Read it through in the BSB and choose two words that seem to carry the weight of the passage: a key verb, or a noun the whole passage turns on. Avoid the commonest words, such as 'and', 'the' or 'is', which have very long entries and teach little at this stage.

For each word, use the interlinear to find the Greek word and its Strong's number, and write both on the right-hand side of your notebook page, next to the verse where it appears. Then make a word card on a fresh page, using the fixed form from section 5. Read at least five other verses where the word occurs, chosen from more than one book if you can, and write the English rendering the BSB uses in each. Read the Thayer entry on Blue Letter Bible and the Meaning entry on STEP Bible, and note any place where they differ.

Finish each card with one sentence: in my passage, this word most likely means this, because of these words around it. Resist the urge to write what the word could mean. Write what it does mean here, and show your evidence. Keep both cards. Lesson 5 will ask you to cross-examine them.