Word study is one of the most common Bible study strategies for folks who have moved beyond merely reading the Bible. The goal of word study is to penetrate your Bible translation to detect the words used by the authors in the original biblical languages. Strong’s numbers are one strategy for doing that. Once you know the original language word, the goal is to discern whether the translator chose the best meaning from among the possible senses the word might have. Dictionaries of words in the biblical languages (lexicons) help Bible students with that task.
Word study is far more than looking up words in original language dictionaries. The effort has many pitfalls. One of the most common is the notion that what a word meant “originally” (when it first became part of the language) or in its most ancient usage somehow is the “real” meaning of that word. Such thinking is flawed.
Consider the word “monotheism,” a word we understand as denoting the existence of only one God. That isn’t what the word originally meant. The word “monotheism” first appeared in English in 1660 as an antonym for “atheism.” So, originally, “monotheism” meant the belief in God as opposed to the rejection of that belief.
The original meaning of “monotheism” really doesn’t lend itself to the way we think about the word today. In our time, we’d use “monotheism” in a discussion about polytheism, not about atheism.
The meaning of a biblical word might change with time. For example, the Hebrew word ger can refer to a foreigner, a resident alien, or a sojourner (a traveler). The correct nuance depends on the historical circumstances of the Old Testament book in which it is found. If the book was written at a time when Israel was a nation with its own land, then the first two options are viable. If not, then the third option is more likely. The circumstance of its occurrence in one book of the Bible really doesn’t say anything about its meaning elsewhere.
Once again, context is king. Word meaning does not derive from the chronology of its usage. Word meaning is driven by current contexts, such as the type of literature in which the word appears (genre) or the writer’s circumstances, which help us know if the usage might be metaphorical instead of literal.