We are often asked how we answer Bible History questions. We use a variety of concordances, histories, academic contacts and online tools. Here are three of our favorites. One of the most common questions we get is how often a word or phrase is in the Bible. The second most common has to do with people of the Bible – the life story if possible and more. Let’s just focus for a minute on that most common question. The words. Here’s what we do. We start with the free tools found at http://www.biblestudytools.com/. Here we can get a quick count of verses, what words were translated as that English word (e.g. 20 different Hebrew/Greek words were translated as love) and what those Hebrew/Greek words mean. How they differ. However it’s a fairly tedious process to track down which verse used which of the 20 words.
For that information, and more, we use our interactive “bible discovery” software where we can look up a word or verse and then click on the parallel Hebrew/Greek word and go immediately to the dictionary. Why? Here’s an example. When we were studying light we found that the root word for the Hebrew translated as darkness means “a twisting away.” Interesting. Darkness twists away from light. (evil from good?)
There are several of these on the market. We’ve used a couple. Here’s one interactive Bible with dictionaries we’ve been testing lately. https://www.olivetree.com/ By the way, we make no money from recommending this software.
To really deepen our understanding we’re learning Biblical Hebrew with all it’s history, subtleties, and implications. Costs some money, takes some time but it’s worth it. We’ve taken courses from this company and they were very good. Even better, they have an ongoing series of FREE webinars. Sign up for them to learn a lot.
Go here to get on the free webinar list and see what the webinars are about.
This is only a small part of the research we do when answering Bible history questions.
Picture References:
http://pixabay.com/en/ray-of-light-live-death-weird-526506/
http://pixabay.com/en/steelwool-dark-firespin-spiral-art-458840/
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