Basics

There are over 750,000 words in the Bible and everyone of them has a meaning! To find out the meaning of a word, a person normally picks up a Webster’s Dictionary and looks up the definition. While that works just fine for looking up words we encounter day to day, it won’t work out so well when trying to define words in the Bible.

We can’t trust a normal dictionary to define Bible words because word meanings change over time. For example, the word “baptize” means to dip, immerse or submerge. If you look up the word in a modern English dictionary it will tell you that baptism is immersion, sprinkling or pouring. This word, like many other words in the English language, has taken on different or additional meanings over the centuries. The Greek word, as it was used in the day when the Bible was written, meant only to immerse. 

There are over 750,000 words in the Bible!  We’ve all heard a friend or teacher mention some phrase from the Bible that we’d like to find and read for ourselves. In a volume as large as the Bible, how does one go about finding the phrase? It’s a lot easier now than it used to be thanks to all sorts of Bible study aids available on the Internet, computers and smart phones. Since you may not always be in a position to use a software tool to do your search, let’s learn how to do it the old fashioned way using a concordance. 

The Bible is a collection of many shorter books, written at different times, and later compiled into one volume.  In the middle ages, the individual books were assigned chapters and verses to make it easier and faster for Bible students to refer to a specific passage of Scripture.  Since the chapter and verse divisions are not part of the original text, they often fail to coincide with the beginning or end of a new thought and may subconsciously be disruptive to the “flow” of the text. In spite of this, they are extremely beneficial to the Bible student and overall are very helpful.

If one is to properly understand the message of the Bible, he or she must first understand how the Bible is structured. We need to be able to read the Bible’s “blueprint”.

Two major sections

The books of the Bible are separated into two major sections. The first 39 books are contained within what is referred to as the Old Testament. The remaining 27 books are in the New Testament. The books of the Old Testament were written in the Hebrew and Aramaic languages. The New Testament books were all written in Greek.