What the Tools Cannot Do

Proverbs 18 is a chapter about listening. The fool 'does not delight in understanding, but only in airing his opinions' (18:2). Answering before hearing is 'folly and disgrace' (18:13). And the anchor verse describes a courtroom: the first to speak 'seems right until another comes and cross-examines him' (18:17). The first speaker need not be lying. His case seems right because no one has tested it yet. Every judge knows that the most persuasive account is often the first one heard, and that it is persuasive for precisely that reason.

A word study done with the free tools is a first speaker. It arrives with evidence, a Greek word, a Strong's number, a lexicon entry, perhaps a striking history, and it seems right. This lesson is about the second speaker: the questions that test a word study before it is preached. Some of those questions are about the tools themselves, which present some kinds of evidence more prominently than they deserve. Others are about what no tool can do at all.

The ground for this has already been laid. Lesson 3 of the Hermeneutics module The Toolbox, 'Word Studies Done Properly', named the classic word-study fallacies, explained where the critique comes from in James Barr's The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961) and D. A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies (1984), corrected three well-known sermon errors in full, and set out a positive method with free tools. Work that lesson if you have not. This one does not repeat its examples. It puts four of the fallacies to work on fresh Greek words, so that you can see them happen on the screen of your own phone, and then turns to the limits of the tools themselves.

Look again at a Blue Letter Bible lexicon entry. Near the top, before the definitions or the passages, is a line describing the word's origin: what it was built from, often with links to the parts. STEP Bible's related-words links can lead the same way. That placement is natural for a dictionary, which has to say where a word comes from somewhere. But it tempts the reader to treat the origin as the foundation of the meaning, and that is the root fallacy: the assumption that a word means what its parts meant.

Take ὑπηρέτης (hypēretēs, servant, attendant), the word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 4:1: 'men ought to regard us as servants of Christ'. It is built from ὑπό (hypo, under) and a word for a rower, and generations of preachers have explained it as an under-rower, a slave chained below deck in a galley, pulling an oar to the beat of a drum. It makes a vivid sermon. It is not what the word meant. In the New Testament it describes the 'servants of the word' who handed down the gospel accounts (Luke 1:2), the synagogue attendant to whom Jesus handed back the scroll (Luke 4:20), the officers who came with Judas to arrest Jesus (John 18:3), and John Mark, who travelled with Paul and Barnabas 'as their helper' (Acts 13:5). In the Greek of the period it meant an assistant, an attendant, an officer serving someone with authority. Nobody hearing Paul in Corinth heard oars. What Paul's sentence does say, in its own words, is that apostles are under Christ's authority and answerable to him, and that is plain enough without the galley.

The etymological fallacy is the root fallacy's cousin: the assumption that the earliest known use of a word governs its later meaning. Here the classic case is ἁμαρτία (hamartia, sin). The related verb ἁμαρτάνω (hamartanō, to sin) can mean to miss a target in older Greek, and preachers often say that sin, in Greek, means missing the mark. Sometimes the point is made to soften sin, as though it were an honest near miss; sometimes to sharpen it, as a failure to hit God's standard. Either way the meaning is being drawn from the wrong place. In the New Testament ἁμαρτία is something that 'entered the world through one man' (Romans 5:12), that can 'reign in your mortal body' (Romans 6:12), that 'deceived me' (Romans 7:11) and of which Paul writes, 'the wages of sin is death' (Romans 6:23). It is a power and a rebellion, not an archery score. The Hebrew verb behind much of the Septuagint's use of this word family shows the same thing: it is used of slingers who could hit a hair 'without missing' (Judges 20:16), and yet it is also the ordinary Hebrew word for sinning against God. Both languages had a literal sense of missing. In both, the religious sense had long since become its own meaning, and usage is how we know it.

One more detail shows how easily this happens. Romans 3:23, 'all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God', is often cited for the missing-the-mark picture. But the words for 'fall short' there translate a different verb altogether, one that means to lack or to come behind. The image of falling short belongs to that verb, not to the word for sin. An interlinear shows this in seconds, which is a good example of the tools correcting a sermon myth rather than causing one.

The tools can correct the opposite mistake too: assuming that one English word always stands for one Greek word. Paul calls himself 'a servant of Christ Jesus' in Romans 1:1, calls himself and Apollos 'servants through whom you believed' in 1 Corinthians 3:5, and asks to be regarded as 'servants of Christ' in 1 Corinthians 4:1. The English is the same three times. The Greek is three different words: δοῦλος (doulos, slave, bondservant) in Romans, διάκονος (diakonos, servant, minister) in 1 Corinthians 3, and ὑπηρέτης in 1 Corinthians 4. Each has its own range, and a study of 'servant' in Paul that treated the three as one word would blur distinctions Paul was free to draw, while a study that insisted each must always mean something sharply different would claim more than his usage shows. The interlinear and the Strong's numbers will separate them for you at once. Weighing what the difference amounts to in each passage is still your work.

None of this means roots are useless. Knowing that a word is built from parts often helps you remember it, and sometimes a compound word's parts are still audible in its use. The rule is that roots may suggest and only usage can decide. When the line about origin and the list of uses point in different directions, follow the uses.

Illegitimate totality transfer, Barr's name for loading every sense of a word into each of its uses, is easy to commit with a lexicon open on a phone, because the lexicon lists all the senses at once. Take κόσμος (kosmos, world, order, adornment). In John's Gospel it is the created world, 'before the world existed' (John 17:5); it is humanity, into which the true Light was coming (John 1:9); and it is humanity organised against God, which 'hates you' (John 15:19). In 1 Peter 3:3 the same noun means adornment, as in braided hair and gold jewellery, which is where English gets 'cosmetics'. A sermon that told you every 'world' in John means created order, humanity, hostile system and beauty all at once would be committing the fallacy. A sermon that found in 1 Peter 3:3 a hint of the whole ordered universe would be committing it the other way round. Each use takes one sense, and the context says which. Where a writer does seem to play on more than one sense, as John 1:10 may when it uses the word three times in a single verse, that must be shown from the sentence, not assumed from the lexicon.

Anachronism is reading a later meaning back into an earlier text, and the most common form of it reads English back into Greek, because an English word descended from a Greek one seems to offer a short cut. Paul says that 'God loves a cheerful giver' (2 Corinthians 9:7), and the word for cheerful is ἱλαρός (hilaros), from which English eventually took 'hilarious'. It is a short step to a sermon about hilarious giving, and the step is not supported. The Greek word meant glad, willing, gracious; in this verse it is set against giving 'out of regret or compulsion' in the same sentence. Glad giving is the point. Laughter is not.

A subtler case is μάρτυς (martys, witness). In Acts 1:8 Jesus tells the apostles, 'you will be My witnesses'. The word is the ordinary one for a person who testifies to what he has seen, used of witnesses at a trial in Matthew 18:16 and of the false witnesses in Acts 6:13. Later Christian Greek used it, and the Latin and English words taken from it, for those who sealed their testimony with their death, and you can watch that sense beginning to form inside the New Testament itself: Paul speaks of 'the blood of Your witness Stephen' (Acts 22:20), and the risen Christ of 'My faithful witness Antipas, who was killed among you' (Revelation 2:13). Scholars differ on how far the later technical sense is already present in those two verses. What is clear is that Acts 1:8 cannot be made to mean 'you will be My martyrs'. The call there is to testify. The New Testament teaches the cost of testimony plainly enough elsewhere, and it does not need the help of an English dictionary.

Carson's Exegetical Fallacies gives anachronism of this kind the name semantic anachronism, and lists its mirror image, semantic obsolescence, which reads into a word an earlier sense that had dropped out of use by the first century. That second error is the special temptation of LSJ, the classical lexicon on STEP Bible from lesson 2, because it gives a word's history across a thousand years. The guard against both is the same: weigh most heavily the uses nearest to your text in time, in author and in kind of writing.

Beyond the fallacies, there are things the tools in this module cannot do even when they are used perfectly. It helps to name them, because a student who has learned to open an interlinear can easily believe that he now has access to everything the Greek says. He has access to its words, their forms and their uses elsewhere. That is a great deal. It is not everything.

First, the tools do not read sentences. An interlinear sets the words side by side and codes each one, but it does not draw the lines between them: which participle depends on which verb, which genitive belongs to which noun, how a clause beginning with 'for' or 'so that' relates to the one before. That is syntax, and modules 3 to 6 of this track teach it. Second, the tools do not read arguments. A word's meaning in a passage depends on what the writer is doing in the whole paragraph and letter, and no lexicon entry can tell you that. Third, the tools do not decide between manuscripts. They will show you which text you are reading and sometimes that another exists, but weighing them is a skill of its own, taught in module 8.

Fourth, and most easily forgotten, the tools do not disagree with you. A search engine finds what you ask for; a concordance lists every verse you look up; a lexicon gives every sense you might want. If you come to the tools with a conclusion already in mind, they will usually supply something that seems to support it, and nothing on the screen will warn you. That is why Proverbs 18:17 belongs at the end of a module on tools. The cross-examiner has to be someone, or something, outside the study you have just done.

Finally, the tools cannot open your eyes. Lesson 2 began with the psalmist's prayer, and it is worth ending the module with it too. A student with every tool and no humility will find in the Greek what he brought to it. A student with few tools and a teachable heart, praying 'Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from Your law' (Psalm 119:18), and checking his work against others, will see more. The tools are servants of reading. They are good servants, and they make very poor masters.

Here is a set of questions to put to any word study before you teach it. Write them in your notebook and use them every time. Which text did I count in, and would a different text change the count? Am I relying on the word's origin, and if so, do its uses agree? Have I given this verse one sense, chosen by its context, or loaded several senses into it? Am I hearing an English word in the Greek? Is the sense I have chosen found in writers near this one in time and kind, or only in the classical lexicon? Does a good translation already say what I have found, and if not, why not? And what would someone who disagreed with my conclusion point to?

Then find a second speaker. The simplest is a second tool: if Thayer on Blue Letter Bible and the Abbott-Smith based entry on STEP Bible disagree, you have a question to settle before you preach. The next is a translation's notes: the NET Bible's free notes often discuss exactly the word you are studying and give the alternatives. Blue Letter Bible's Commentaries tab offers older commentaries such as Matthew Henry's, which are dated and uneven on Greek but useful for seeing how the church has read a verse. And the best second speaker of all is a person: a fellow student, an elder, a pastor who knows some Greek, or a study group that works through passages together. Show them your word card and ask them to find its weakest point.

Do not be discouraged if the cross-examination knocks down much of what you found. That is its purpose, and what survives is worth far more than a sermon full of discoveries that a well-read listener could dismantle. The aim of this module was never to make you an expert in Greek words. It was to make you a reader who can see what the free tools show, know what they hide, and tell the difference between evidence and an impression. That reader can serve a church for a lifetime.

Return to the two word cards you made in lesson 2 for the passage you chose in lesson 1. Read each card against the questions in section 5, one question at a time, and write the answer to each on the back of the card. Be strict with yourself, as the second speaker in Proverbs 18:17 would be.

Then look specifically for the four fallacies of this lesson. If your card leans on the word's origin, test the origin against at least five uses. If you have written more than one sense for the word in your verse, decide which one the context selects and cross out the rest. If an English word descended from the Greek has crept into your notes, check whether the Greek ever meant that. And if you used the LSJ entry on STEP Bible, check whether the sense you chose is found in writers near the New Testament.

Finally, rewrite the one-sentence conclusion at the bottom of each card, so that it says only what the evidence supports. Show both cards to one other person this week, if you can, and ask them which sentence they would challenge. With the interlinear page from lesson 1, the parsing notes from lesson 3, the divergence log from lesson 4 and these two cross-examined cards, you now have the first layer of the study of your passage that this track's last lesson will complete.