Word Families

Greek makes new words the way a carpenter makes furniture from one kind of timber: it takes a stem and adds endings that turn it into a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb. Once you can see the stem and know what the common endings usually do, a word you have never met often tells you roughly where it belongs. That is a gift to a student learning vocabulary, because one family may give you five or six words for the effort of one.

Take the family behind Romans 3:24. Its oldest member is δίκη (dikē), right, justice, and then the penalty that justice imposes; it occurs only three times in the New Testament, as the penalty in 2 Thessalonians 1:9 and the punishment in Jude 7, and in Acts 28:4 as Justice itself, spoken of by the islanders of Malta as a power that will not let a murderer live. From it come δίκαιος (dikaios, righteous, just), 79 times in the SBLGNT; δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosynē, righteousness, justice), 91 times, 33 of them in Romans; and the verb δικαιόω (dikaioō, to justify, vindicate, declare or show to be in the right), 39 times, 15 of them in Romans and 8 in Galatians. Then come rarer members: δικαίωμα (dikaiōma, a righteous requirement or a righteous act), δικαίωσις (dikaiōsis, justification, twice, both in Romans), δικαίως (dikaiōs, justly), and δικαιοκρισία (dikaiokrisia, righteous judgement), found only at Romans 2:5. Put the prefix ἀ- (a-, un-, not) in front and you get the family's shadow: ἄδικος (adikos, unrighteous), ἀδικία (adikia, wrongdoing, injustice) and ἀδικέω (adikeō, to do wrong).

The endings follow patterns you can learn. The ending -σύνη makes a noun naming a quality: δικαιοσύνη from δίκαιος, and σωφροσύνη (sōphrosynē, self-control) from σώφρων (sōphrōn, self-controlled). Verbs in -όω often mean to make something what the stem names: δουλόω (douloō, to enslave), φανερόω (phaneroō, to make visible, reveal). Nouns in -μα often name the result of an action and nouns in -σις the action itself, which is why δικαίωμα and δικαίωσις sit side by side in Romans 5:18. These are tendencies, not laws, and the rest of this lesson is about the places where they let a reader down.

One family from Matthew 6:2 shows how much can be packed into a stem. The word behind give to the needy is ἐλεημοσύνην (eleēmosynēn), from ἐλεημοσύνη (eleēmosynē), the -σύνη noun from the family of ἔλεος (eleos, mercy). To give alms was, in Greek, to do mercy. The English word alms itself descends, through Latin and Old English, from this very Greek word, worn down over the centuries until no one could hear the mercy in it.

Romans 3:21-26 is one of the most closely argued paragraphs Paul wrote, and the dikaios family runs all the way through it. The paragraph opens by announcing that the righteousness of God, δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ (dikaiosynē theou), has been revealed apart from the law (3:21). It says this righteousness comes through faith to all who believe (3:22). It says that all who have sinned are δικαιούμενοι (dikaioumenoi, being justified), the present passive participle, nominative plural masculine, of δικαιόω, freely by his grace (3:24). And it ends with a purpose clause in which the family appears three times: God did this to demonstrate his δικαιοσύνη, εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτὸν δίκαιον καὶ δικαιοῦντα (eis to einai auton dikaion kai dikaiounta, so that he might be just and justifying) the one who has faith in Jesus (3:26).

In Greek the reader hears the argument in the words themselves. The problem the paragraph answers is stated in 3:25: in his forbearance God had passed over the sins committed beforehand, and a judge who passes over wrongs is not obviously just. Paul's answer is that in the death of Christ God shows his righteousness, so that he is both δίκαιος and the one who makes or declares others δίκαιος. The family keeps the whole paragraph in one field of meaning, the field of right standing before a just God, and it lets Paul set God's own justice and the justification of sinners next to each other as one act.

English cannot keep the family together, because English took the two halves of its vocabulary from different places. Righteous and righteousness come from Old English; just, justice and justify came through French from Latin. So the BSB, like every English Bible, renders one Greek family with two English families, and the reader who knows no Greek sees righteousness in 3:21 and justify in 3:24 without seeing that Paul is using one word group. Some writers have tried to repair this by reviving an old English verb, to rightwise, so that righteousness and rightwise can be heard together; it has never caught on, but it shows that the problem is felt.

Latin kept the family whole: iustitia, iustus and iustificare are one stem, and the Vulgate reads Romans 3:26 with all three audible. So do many other languages. If you speak a language other than English, look up how your own Bible translates Romans 3:21-26 and see whether the righteousness of God and the word for justify share a root. If they do, your hearers have an advantage English speakers lack, and you should use it when you preach this paragraph. If they do not, you now know that the connection has to be pointed out.

The first gift of a family is that it shows connections a translation hides, as Romans 3:26 does. A second example runs through the whole New Testament. πίστις (pistis, faith, faithfulness), 242 times, πιστεύω (pisteuō, to believe, trust), 241 times, and πιστός (pistos, faithful, believing), 67 times, are one family. English again splits it into faith and believe, two words from two roots, so that an English reader can think of faith as a thing a person has and believing as something he does, when in Greek they are the noun and verb of one idea. John's Gospel never uses the noun at all and uses the verb 98 times, which tells you something about how John thinks of faith: as an act of trust, not a possession.

A third example sits in a single verse. 1 John 4:7 begins Ἀγαπητοί, ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλους (Agapētoi, agapōmen allēlous, beloved, let us love one another). The address beloved, ἀγαπητοί, is the adjective from the same family as the verb love, ἀγαπάω, and the noun ἀγάπη follows in the same verse. The BSB keeps the family audible with Beloved, let us love; some translations render the first word as dear friends, which is accurate and natural, and loses the play. Seeing the family tells you that John is asking people who are loved to love, which is the argument of the whole chapter in two words.

The second gift is practical: families multiply your vocabulary. A student who has learned δίκαιος can make a sensible first guess at δικαιοσύνη, δικαιόω and ἄδικος when he meets them, and then confirm the guess with the tool. Learning a family together, on one card or on cards kept side by side, takes little more effort than learning one word. When you add a word to your cards from the last lesson, ask your tool for its relatives; Blue Letter Bible's lexicon entries usually say what a word is derived from, and STEP Bible shows related words from the same root.

The danger is to treat the family as if every member carried a shared core meaning that can be dug out of the stem, which is the root fallacy that Module 2's lesson What the Tools Cannot Do named, and that the Hermeneutics track's lesson Word Studies Done Properly worked through with ἐκκλησία. A family is like a human family: its members resemble each other, and they do not all do the same job. James Barr's point in The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961) was that a word's meaning is found in how it is used in sentences, not in where it came from, and that point applies to families as much as to single words.

English shows the same thing, which makes it easy to explain to a congregation. Understand is built from under and stand, but no one thinks that to understand something is to stand underneath it. A butterfly is not a fly made of butter, and a pineapple is neither a pine nor an apple. Every speaker of English knows these words from their use, and would laugh at a teacher who explained them from their parts. Greek speakers in the first century knew their words the same way, and the reader's task is to learn the words as they knew them, from use, not to take them apart as they never did.

The hypocrite in the inquiry is the plain case. ὑποκριτής occurs 17 times in the New Testament, 13 of them in Matthew, and it meant an actor. Its stem is related to κρίνω (krinō, to judge), and its prefix is ὑπό (hypo, under), but a hypocrite was never an under-judge. The word's history went through answering and interpreting to playing a part on the stage, and by the first century it meant a performer and, by extension, a pretender. Jesus' warnings in Matthew 6 depend on the theatre, not on the parts of the word.

Members of a family also drift apart in use, sometimes within one writer. In Romans 8:4 δικαίωμα is the righteous standard of the law, the requirement the law makes; in Romans 5:18 it is one act of righteousness, Christ's obedience. Same word, same letter, two different senses, each chosen by its sentence. Compounds can mislead in the same way. Some commentators, such as J. B. Lightfoot on Colossians 1:9, held that ἐπίγνωσις (epignōsis, knowledge) means a fuller or more complete knowledge than the simple γνῶσις (gnōsis, knowledge), because of its prefix. Others, such as J. Armitage Robinson in his commentary on Ephesians (1903), argued that the compound points to knowledge of a particular object rather than to more knowledge. The prefix alone cannot decide between them. Only the uses can.

Even the patterns in section 1 have exceptions that matter. Verbs in -όω often mean to make, but not always. ἀξιόω (axioō), from ἄξιος (axios, worthy), does not mean to make worthy; it means to count or consider worthy, as in Luke 7:7, I did not consider myself worthy, and 2 Thessalonians 1:11, that our God will count you worthy of His calling. So the -όω ending of δικαιόω cannot by itself tell you whether the verb means to make righteous or to count, declare or show righteous. The ending gives a reader two possibilities. Usage has to choose between them, and that brings us to the most argued-over word in this family.

Some things about δικαιόω are widely agreed across the traditions, and it helps to say them plainly. In a great many of its uses in the Greek Old Testament and the New, the verb is the language of a verdict: to declare someone in the right, to acquit or vindicate. Luke 7:29 cannot mean that the people made God righteous. In Luke 18:14 the tax collector went home justified after a prayer for mercy. In Romans 2:13 the BSB renders the verb will be declared righteous. In Romans 8:33-34 It is God who justifies stands opposite Who is there to condemn us? Scholars from very different churches read Paul's verb as forensic, that is, as the language of a court; the Jesuit Joseph Fitzmyer, in his commentary on Romans in the Anchor Bible (1993), was one. Romans 6:7 shows the range is wider than one courtroom formula: there the BSB renders the verb has been freed from sin. Some readers hear in it acquittal from sin's claim, others release from its power, and the difference between those two readings is a small version of the larger debate.

What the lexicon does not settle is what that verdict rests on and what comes with it, and there the church is genuinely divided. The Reformation churches, following Luther and Calvin and set out in confessions such as the Westminster Confession (1646), teach that God justifies the ungodly (Romans 4:5) by pardoning their sins and counting them righteous for Christ's sake alone, not for anything done in them, and that renewal of life, which always follows, is sanctification and a distinct gift. They point to 4:5, to faith credited as righteousness (4:3), and to the courtroom setting of 3:19-26 and 8:33-34, and they hold that confusing the verdict with the renewal leaves a believer without assurance.

The Catholic Church, at the Council of Trent's sixth session in 1547, teaches that justification is not only the forgiveness of sins but also the sanctification and renewal of the inner person, by which a sinner is truly made righteous, because the righteousness God gives becomes really his. Catholic theologians do not deny that the verb speaks of a verdict; they hold that God's verdict, unlike a human judge's, makes true what it declares. They point to Romans 5:5, where God has poured out His love into our hearts, to Titus 3:5-7, where justification comes with the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, and to James 2:24, a man is justified by his deeds and not by faith alone, which Trent read as speaking of growth in justification.

A third reading, associated above all with N. T. Wright, keeps the courtroom but asks what the verdict is about. On this view, set out in his Justification (2009) and elsewhere, God's declaration is that a person belongs to his covenant family, the one people of Jews and Gentiles promised to Abraham, which is why Romans 3:21-26 is followed at once by Is God the God of Jews only? (3:29) and why the argument in Galatians 2 begins at a dinner table. Defenders of the older Protestant reading reply that this moves the centre from the ungodly sinner to the community, and Wright replies that it puts the sinner inside the story Paul himself tells. The Systematic Theology track's lesson Justification, in its module Salvation, sets out all of these at length, with the Orthodox question and the Joint Declaration of 1999, and you should read it before preaching on this word.

What this lesson can say is narrower and still useful. Knowing the family shows you that righteousness, just and justify belong together in Romans 3, and that Paul is talking about God's own justice and the sinner's standing at the same time. Knowing the range of δικαιόω shows you that the verdict sense is common and that it is not the only sense. Neither fact settles the debates in the last three paragraphs, because they are not disputes about the dictionary. They are disputes about how Paul's whole argument in Romans and Galatians fits together, and they are settled, if they are settled at all, by reading the argument.

Open your Words in my passage page and your Words to study list. Choose one word from your passage that belongs to a family; most nouns and verbs that matter do. Look it up in Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible and find at least two other members of its family. On a fresh page headed with the family's stem, write each member with its gloss, its New Testament count, and two references where it occurs.

For each member, read the two verses and write in a few words what the member means there. Then write two sentences at the bottom of the page. The first says what the family shows about your passage that your English translation hides, if anything; sometimes the honest answer is nothing. The second says what the family cannot tell you, and what you would need to look at instead, which will usually be the other uses of your word by the same writer.

Add the family members to your vocabulary cards, side by side. Then go back to the two sentences you wrote in the inquiry about what justified means. Underline any part that the lexicon supports, and circle any part that comes from a theological tradition rather than from the word. A circle is not a mark of error: every tradition reads this word through a theology, and the point is to know which is which. If you circled something you have always assumed, write it on your Claims to test page, and read the Systematic Theology lesson on justification before you teach it.