The Three Questions to Ask of Any Greek Word

When a minister consults the Greek behind a passage, three questions are enough — and one is not. The minister who stops after the first question produces the kind of Greek-flavored sermon point that frustrates anyone who actually knows Greek. Asking all three takes a few extra minutes and produces claims that hold up.

The three questions are these: What does the lexicon say about this word? What is the word doing in this sentence? What is the word doing in this author and this corpus?

Question one: What does the lexicon say

The lexicon question is not "what does this word mean," because most Greek words have a range of meanings rather than a single meaning. The question is what range the lexicon assigns and which sense the lexicon places this passage under.

A serious lexicon — BDAG for Koine, LSJ for the broader Greek world, Louw-Nida for a domain-organized perspective — will list several senses for the word, give the contexts in which each sense appears, and often classify particular passages under particular senses. That last move is the one the lexicon is doing with its expertise. When BDAG places your verse under sense 3b rather than sense 1, that placement is the lexicon's reading.

Stopping here gives you a more honest picture than Strong's alone. But it is still incomplete.

Question two: What is the word doing in this sentence

A word's dictionary range narrows when it is placed in a sentence. The grammar carries information that the lexicon range alone does not. The participle's tense, the preposition that governs the noun, the case of the surrounding words, the position in the clause — all of these constrain which sense from the range is actually in play here.

This is the question Strong's cannot help with at all. Strong's is a number; the sentence is grammar. The minister who consults Strong's and skips the grammar can say "the word means X" without noticing that the construction the word sits in makes sense X impossible. The reverse can also happen: a sense that looks unusual in the lexicon list is the obvious sense once you see what construction the word is in.

You do not need to be a Greek scholar to ask this question. You need a good interlinear that exposes the grammatical features and a willingness to sit with the sentence for two minutes. Often the answer is obvious once you look.

Question three: What is the word doing in this author and this corpus

The third question moves from the sentence to the larger setting. Some words have a peculiar profile in a particular author. Paul uses certain words in distinctive ways; John uses certain words in distinctive ways; the Septuagint colors the New Testament's vocabulary in ways that change the picture.

The right question is not "what is the general semantic range of this word in Greek" but "what is this writer doing with this word, given how they use it elsewhere." A concordance pass through the writer's other uses often shifts which sense from the lexicon is most likely here.

This is the question that protects ministers from the most common Greek error: assigning a sense from the lexicon range that is real in Greek generally but never used by this author. The lexicon will list it. The writer never reaches for it. The sermon point quietly drifts off the writer's actual usage.

Three minutes is enough

These three questions take a few minutes to ask if you have the tools and the habit. They also produce Greek claims you can stand under. Asking only the first question is what produces the sermon Greek that gives the discipline a bad name. Asking all three is what produces sermon Greek that earns its place.