Bible words and their meaning—Strong's Numbers

Bible words and their meaning—Strong's Numbers
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Strong's Numbers enable people who do not know Greek or Hebrew to understand the meaning of words in the Bible.

The American Professor James Strong, 1822-1894, allocated a unique number to each word stem in the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament. For example, if Strong's system had been applied to English, then "go" and "went" would have the same Strong's Number, because they are parts of the same verb - but "came" would have a separate number. Just to confirm, Strong's Numbers apply to Greek and Hebrew, not to English.

To find the meaning of a Bible word, there are two stages:-

(1) Look up the verse in a version of the English Bible which has every word labelled with the Strong's Number of its original Greek or Hebrew word. That gives the relevant Strong's Number.

(2) Look up that Strong's Number. There will be a definition of the Greek or Hebrew word. Also, there will be a list of all Bible verses which include that Strong's Number - and a table of usual English translations, with the number of times each occurs.

It may be easiest to work on the world wide Web. For offline use, the Xiphos program can be used.

How to use Strong's Numbers—an example

Luke 24:4 states, "two men stood by them". The obvious reading of the English is that the men were standing, that is, that the ordinary Greek verb "to stand" is used. That can be checked using Strong's Numbers, with a surprising result. Incidentally, the four accounts of the discovery of the Saviour's resurrection are discussed at the wikiChristian page "Resurrection of Jesus - Wenham's harmony of the four accounts of the first Easter Sunday".

Step (1): Googling "Lk 24:4 Strong" gives a page of the BibleHub website, and hovering on the phrase "stood by" gives the number 2186.

Step (2):-

Googling "Strong's Greek 2186 Biblestudytools" gives the information that, in the King James Version, 2186 is translated "to stand" 6 times but "to come", instead, 10 times (excluding miscellaneous items). Likewise, in the New American Standard version, "to stand" is used only 6 times out of 21.

Googling "Strong 2186 Greek" gives a page of the BibleHub website, which shows that 2186 is a composite verb "epiHistemi", that is, "to uponStand". Compare the English verb "to underStand", which, in modern usage, does not relate to standing.

Googling "Strong 2186 Greek" also gives a page of the BibleTools website, which shows that 2186 is used only 21 times, almost always in Luke or Acts, and its first instance is Luke 2:9, "the angel of the Lord came upon them". The last instance in the Gospel of Luke is the current verse.

Another useful website is http://lexiconcordance.com . Type the Strong's Number into the Greek or Hebrew "enter search here" box at the left.

So it now looks as though the verb 2186 cannot be the ordinary verb "to stand", that 2186 may imply angels and that it certainly does not usually mean "to stand".

Offline use of Strong's Numbers—Xiphos

Xiphos is a free-distribution computer Bible system for Windows, UNIX and Linux. It supports Strong's Numbers. It can be downloaded onto a computer for later use when the internet is unavailable. Downloads are from https://xiphos.org/

After installing Xiphos:- At the Module Manager, download the Bible versions required, including KJV and KJVA. Also download appropriate dictionaries: anything re: Strong, and the Morphological items. (And, among commentaries, Scripture Quoting Scripture and Treasury of Scripture Knowledge are useful.) Then go to the Maintenance menu option (you may need to click on the "fullSize" symbol (the square) near the top right hand corner of the module manager) and index all the downloaded items. At the main Xiphos window, open KJVA at a New Testament book, put the cursor in the main (Bible text) pane and right-click, then select, for ModuleOptions, everything. That is, to add Strong's numbers and/or morphology to the module, rightclick | ModuleOptions and click on the options wanted.

To search for Strong's numbers (to see all occurrences of a number in the Bible), go to advanced search, make sure ordinary tab has "lucene" selected, go to "attribute" tab, select "Strong" (and select all the right-hand-side tickboxes) and search for "lemma:G1234" (greek) or "lemma:H1234" (Hebrew). (Sometimes needs any initial zero, sometimes needs its absence.)

More information at https://xiphos.org/manual/originallanguage.html .

A similar free app for mobile phones is "MySword Bible" from Galaxy Store. That gives the Strong's Number look-up and also a Thayer and a Strong's definition for each Strong's Number.

Links

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