We all know from experience that the words we use can be understood and intended in different ways. No word means the same exact thing every time it’s used. I love my wife and I love pizza. The pizza really isn’t giving my wife competition for my attention. My emotional attachment to my wife is of a different nature and intensity than my desire for pizza. But I can use the word “love” with respect to both.
What helps us so easily parse a difference here? Real life. Our experiences provide context. Words don’t mean anything in isolation. They can’t mean anything until they are put in context. Context determines word meaning; nothing else does.
For some reason, this obvious truth gets lost for some Bible students who are doing word studies. The process goes something like this: Research tools help us identify the original language word behind an English word that draws our interest in a particular verse. Then we look up that word in a word study dictionary. So far so good. But here’s where many Bible students go off the tracks. All too often, students use these dictionaries to discover what a Greek or Hebrew word can mean, to latch on to an interesting option, and to mine for verses where the word has the meaning we’re looking for. The fact that the word can have a given meaning, and actually does in other verses, provides a justification for assigning that meaning to the word in the verse under scrutiny.
That isn’t word study. That’s cherry-picking a meaning from a list of possibilities and considering other contexts (other verses) in place of the context of the word in your passage. Seeing that clearly should remind us that a word’s meaning in one instance may be different in another.
Real word studies take time. There is no substitute for discerning the contexts that come to bear on the word you want to study and then, one by one, testing whether other meanings are possible in that same setting. Context makes that determination, not a list of possible meanings in a dictionary.