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When the Strong's Number Is Not Enough
Three situations where Strong's gets you to the door but cannot get you through it. Recognize them and reach for a real lexicon.
Strong's is a serviceable starting tool for word study. It is also a tool with edges. There are situations where it gets a minister to the door but cannot get them through, and the discipline is to recognize those situations and reach for a real lexicon.
Three situations recur often enough to be worth naming.
When the gloss is too thin to choose between senses
Strong's gives you a brief gloss. The gloss usually covers the most common sense or two. For words with broad semantic ranges — and in Greek and Hebrew that is most words — the gloss is necessarily simplified.
If you are preaching a passage where the precise sense matters — and the sermon point depends on which sense the writer is using — the gloss is not enough. The lexicon will distinguish between senses, give you the contexts in which each appears, and often classify the verse you are preaching under a particular sense. That last move is the one Strong's cannot make.
The signal that you are in this territory is a sermon point that turns on what the word "really means." If you are about to make that argument, you owe yourself ten minutes with a real lexicon before you preach it.
When the word is part of an idiom
Some Greek and Hebrew words appear in fixed phrases where the word's individual meaning is overridden by the idiom. Strong's lists the word's typical sense. The idiom is doing something different, and the lexicon will say so explicitly.
This is where the most embarrassing Greek goes wrong. The minister consults Strong's, finds the typical gloss, builds a sermon point on that gloss, and preaches confidently — without realizing the word is in an idiom that means something else. The lexicon would have flagged the idiom in its second or third entry. Strong's, by design, does not.
The signal that you are in this territory is a phrase that translators handle suspiciously similarly across translations, even when those translations usually differ. That convergence is often the trace of an idiom.
When two Greek words are the same Strong's number but differ in usage
Strong's groups some words for indexing reasons. Two distinct senses, or even two grammatically distinct uses, may carry the same Strong's number. The minister relying on Strong's alone may treat them as a single semantic unit when in fact the writer is doing different things in different places.
The lexicon separates these out. A serious word study traces the word through the writer's other uses and notices when the writer uses it in distinct ways. The Strong's number alone will smooth over distinctions the writer was deliberately making.
What to do at the door
When Strong's has gotten you to the door, three steps are usually enough.
Open BDAG (or LSJ, or HALOT, or whichever serious lexicon fits the corpus) to the entry. Read the entry's senses, not just the headword. Note which sense the lexicon places your verse under, if it places it.
Read the surrounding sentence and ask which sense the grammar supports. The lexicon's sense and the sentence's grammar should agree. If they do not, slow down — you may have misidentified the sense.
If the word matters enough to your sermon point that you would defend the claim in conversation with a Greek-fluent colleague, do the work that lets you defend it. If not, lighten the claim or cut it.
Strong's is a tool. Like all tools, it is honest about what it can and cannot do. The discipline is to honor the boundary.