STEPBible's Original-Language Data

STEPBible and Tyndale House

At the foot of the Original tab a small line reads "Original-language data: STEP Bible (CC BY 4.0)". Everything the tab shows, the Greek and Hebrew words, their grammar and the lexicon, comes from STEPBible. STEP stands for Scripture Tools for Every Person, and the name states the aim: to bring the original text within reach of people who have never studied Greek or Hebrew.

STEPBible is a project of Tyndale House in Cambridge, England. Named after William Tyndale, the sixteenth-century reformer who first translated the New Testament into English from the Greek, Tyndale House is a research institute with a specialist library for biblical studies, where scholars from many countries study the languages, text and history of the Bible. In 2017 its scholars published a new edition of the Greek New Testament. STEPBible is both a free study website (www.STEPBible.org) and the body of data underneath it.

That data is published openly. Its files carry the word Translators in their names, because it was prepared first of all for people translating the Bible into the languages of the world. It is released under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, CC BY 4.0: anyone may use it, provided they say where it came from. On those terms this app uses it for the Original tab and for the Greek and Hebrew courses under Learn, and credits it in Settings under Study sources.

The app draws on three kinds of material: the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament, with every word tagged with its dictionary form, its Strong's number and its grammar; two brief lexicons, Greek and Hebrew, which those numbers open; and tables that spell out the grammar codes, so that a tag such as V-PAI-2S appears as Verb · Present · Active · Indicative · 2nd · Singular.

For the New Testament STEPBible does not pick a single printed edition. It gathers the words of the major editions into one amalgamated text and records which editions contain each word; its introduction counts about 94 per cent of the words as the same in virtually all manuscripts. The app shows the words found in either of two of those editions: the Nestle-Aland text (NA), the critical edition that most modern translations follow, and the Textus Receptus (TR) in F. H. A. Scrivener's edition of 1894, which reconstructs the Greek behind the King James Version. A word found in only one of the two carries a small NA or TR badge. The Old Testament follows the Leningrad Codex, copied around 1008, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible and the basis of most editions scholars use today. The parts written in Aramaic, chiefly Daniel 2–7 and sections of Ezra 4–7, are tagged in the same way.

What the data gives each word

Tap a word on the Original tab and several pieces of information appear. They look technical, but each answers a simple question.

The original text. The Old Testament was written mostly in Hebrew, with a few chapters in the closely related Aramaic; the New Testament was written in Koine, the common Greek of the first-century Mediterranean world. The tab shows each word exactly as it stands in the text, endings and all. Greek reads from left to right, Hebrew from right to left, and the tab sets Hebrew out that way.

The lemma. Words change their form in a sentence. In John 21:15 Jesus asks ἀγαπᾷς, do you love; in John 3:35 the Father ἀγαπᾷ, loves, the Son. The forms differ, but the word is one, agapaō (ἀγαπάω), and that dictionary form is called the lemma. Hebrew also attaches small words to the front of a word (and, the, in) and pronoun endings to the back (my, his). In Psalm 23:1 the single word רֹעִי (roʿi) means my shepherd, and its lemma is the verb raah (רָעָה), to pasture.

Strong's numbers. In 1890 James Strong (1822–1894), an American Methodist scholar, published The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, which lists every word of the King James Version with every verse it occurs in. At the back he added a Hebrew and a Greek dictionary and numbered their words in alphabetical order: 1 to 8674 for Hebrew, Aramaic included, and 1 to 5624 for Greek, so that readers without the languages could find the word behind the English. The numbers became a shared key for Bible software, and the app writes them with G or H in front and four digits, as G0025.

Extended numbers. Sometimes one of Strong's numbers covers things that ought to be kept apart, and STEPBible adds a letter to separate them. The Hebrew חֶסֶד (chesed) is almost always chesed, kindness, but in Leviticus 20:17 and Proverbs 14:34 the same letters spell a different word, chesed, shame. The Greek name Ἰησοῦς (Iēsous) is divided by person: G2424G is the Lord Jesus and G2424I is Joshua, and other letters mark namesakes, among them the Jesus Barabbas of some manuscripts at Matthew 27:16. Senses can be split too: πνεῦμα (pneuma) is G4151G for spirit and G4151H for breath or wind. And a few words have new numbers beyond Strong's range, such as the G6063 on οἶδας, you know, in John 21:15.

Grammar tags. Each word carries a label describing its form. It begins with the part of speech. For a Greek noun there follow case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative), number and gender; for a verb, tense, voice, mood, person and number. A Hebrew verb shows its stem (Qal, Piel, Hiphil and so on) and its form (perfect, imperfect, consecutive imperfect and others), and a noun shows whether it is absolute or construct. Prefixes and suffixes joined to a word are added with a plus sign. רֹעִי in Psalm 23:1 is labelled Verb · Qal · Participle · Masculine · Singular · Construct + Suffix · Personal · First · Either gender · Singular: a participle, one who pastures, with my attached. In the Aramaic chapters the verb stems carry their Aramaic names, such as Peal.

Interlinear. Setting out the original words in their own order, each with a short meaning beneath it, makes an interlinear. Psalm 23:1 is four words in Hebrew, and the tab glosses them Yahweh, [is] shepherd my, not, I lack. That is not a translation. The order is the Hebrew order, and each gloss helps with one word, not with a sentence; turning these four words into "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalm 23:1) is the translator's work. In the English app the gloss under each word is STEPBible's English for that word in that place (in the New Testament adapted from the Berean Study Bible). An interlinear does not replace a translation; it lets you see what a translation has done with the words in front of it. Using the Original panel shows how to read one line of the tab.

The two lexicons

Below the word comes its lexicon entry: the lemma with its number, a short gloss naming its main meaning, and a fuller definition setting out the range of its uses, with verses for each.

The Greek entries come almost all from A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament by George Abbott-Smith, first published in the early 1920s; the mark (AS) at the end of a definition is his. For each word he notes, in square brackets, which Hebrew words it chiefly translates in the Septuagint (LXX), the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament. Then he divides its meanings and gives references for each, and he often ends by comparing synonyms, marked SYN. The entry for ekklēsia (ἐκκλησία) says that it chiefly renders קָהָל (qahal), the congregation of Israel, and then moves from an assembly of citizens, to the congregation of Israel, to the church, gathered for worship, local and universal. The lexicon shows the New Testament's word for the church standing in line with the gathered people of God in the Old.

Some of his abbreviations are worth knowing: al. means and elsewhere, ib. in the same place, cf. compare. He also names the books of Samuel and Kings as the Greek Old Testament does, as four books of Kingdoms, so a reference printed 1Ki.21:1 may belong to 1 Samuel. The app has worked out the right verse, and each reference is a link that opens it in the translation you are reading.

The Hebrew entries are brief definitions based on an abridged form of Brown, Driver and Briggs's Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB, early twentieth century), with people and places from STEPBible's list of every individual and place named in the Bible. Many are short: the definition of chesed is a single line, goodness, kindness, faithfulness. The Korean edition of the app shows each definition in Korean first, with the English a tap away.

Like any dictionary, these carry their makers' judgements. At the end of the ἀγαπάω entry Abbott-Smith reports the common view that, from its supposed etymology, agapaō denotes love grounded in esteem while phileō (φιλέω) is warm, spontaneous affection, and then he adds the caution "If this distinction holds". The app's entry for ruach (רוּחַ) sorts its senses from breath and wind through mind and temper to spirit, and its last heading describes the Spirit of God as the third person of the triune God: the confession of the church, written into a lexicon. A lexicon is a map of how scholars have sorted a word's uses, and every map shows its makers' understanding.

What it is good for, and its limits

The tab shows the word behind a translation. In Hebrews 4:8 the King James Version names Jesus where the BSB reads "For if Joshua had given them rest" (Hebrews 4:8). Neither has made a mistake. The Original tab shows the same name, Ἰησοῦς, behind both, because Joshua's Hebrew name written in Greek is the name Jesus. The King James translators kept the Greek form; the BSB, like most modern versions, names the Joshua who led Israel into the land, as the context requires, and the tag agrees: G2424I, Joshua. When translations differ, the tab will often show whether the difference lies in the original or in the translators' choice.

It shows where else a word is used. Follow ἐκκλησία through Where this word is used and you find the church Christ promised to build (Matthew 16:18), and also the riot in the theatre at Ephesus, where the same word names the crowd and the town meeting, and both the BSB and the King James Version translate it assembly (Acts 19:32, 39, 41). It was an ordinary word for people called together, and the New Testament took it for the people Christ has gathered.

It shows why translations differ. The BSB renders chesed as mercy in Psalm 23:6, loving devotion in Psalm 136:1 and kindness in Genesis 39:21. The King James Version mostly says mercy, but in Ruth 1:8 Naomi prays that the LORD will deal kindly with her daughters-in-law, and STEPBible's word-by-word English usually glosses it covenant loyalty. The word is generally understood as the steadfast love and faithfulness that belong to a covenant, shown by God to his people and by people to one another, and no single English word holds it all. Read the nearly 240 verses that use it and you will feel a meaning wider than any one rendering.

But word study is easily misused, and some of its mistakes are common enough to have names. First, a dictionary meaning is not the meaning in every verse. A lexicon gathers all the senses a word can have; in a given verse it usually has one. Phileō can also mean to kiss, and it was the sign Judas agreed on (Matthew 26:48), but nobody reads John 21 as Peter offering to kiss the Lord. Loading every sense of a word into one verse (sometimes called illegitimate totality transfer) does not enrich the reading; it distorts it.

Second, a word's origin does not fix its meaning. Because ἐκκλησία is built from ek, out, and kaleō, to call, the church is often preached as the called-out ones (the root fallacy). That the church is a people called by God is taught throughout Scripture, but it is not carried by this word's etymology: the citizens of Ephesus were an ekklēsia too. Meaning comes from use. A related mistake runs backwards, reading dunamis (δύναμις) through dynamite; but dynamite was named from the Greek word in the nineteenth century, and it cannot tell us what Paul meant in calling the gospel the power of God. A Hebrew root is a good key for recognising related words (The three-letter root), but words from one root need not share a meaning.

Third, a tag is an analysis. The grammatical tags and the sense numbers are the work of scholars, usually beyond dispute but sometimes a matter of judgement.

The wind blows where it wishes. You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.

John 3:8

Wind and Spirit are one word in Greek, πνεῦμα, and Jesus plays on both senses: the Spirit, like the wind, is unseen and known by what he does. STEPBible, however, gives both occurrences in this verse the breath number, G4151H, even though its English gloss for the second is Spirit. In Genesis 1:2 it tags ruach with the sense spirit; the BSB, like the King James Version, reads the Spirit of God, while some modern translations render it as a wind from God. Tenses need the same care: an aorist does not of itself mean once for all (The aorist). What a tag says and what it can be made to prove are different things.

Fourth, the editions differ in places. At the end of the Lord's Prayer every word of the doxology carries a TR badge: it stands in the Textus Receptus but not in Nestle-Aland. The King James Version keeps it, while the BSB ends the prayer at "deliver us from the evil one" (Matthew 6:13). Many churches close the prayer with the doxology, and Christians differ over which Greek text to follow. The app does not decide between them; it shows the words of both and marks those found in only one (Reading the Lord's Prayer).

Fifth, the translation remains your Bible. Making the Scriptures understood is a task as old as the Scriptures themselves:

So they read from the Book of the Law of God, explaining it and giving insight, so that the people could understand what was being read.

Nehemiah 8:8

The BSB, the King James Version and the Korean translations are the work of translators who knew these languages well and weighed this evidence for years; a gloss seldom overturns their conclusions. If a look at the original leaves you disagreeing with every translation, suspect your own reading first. The Original tab is a window onto the translation, not a replacement for it; the Bible you read, pray over and learn by heart is still a translated Bible.

In this app

In the reader, tap a verse and a bar appears at the foot of the screen; tap Study and a sheet opens with four tabs: Original, Commentary, Cross-refs and Topics. The Original tab sets out the verse's words in their original order, each with its gloss, and Show as a list gives one line per word. In a psalm with a title, verse 1 shows the title's words first.

Tap a word for its form, transliteration, gloss, Strong's number and grammar, with an NA or TR badge where the word is found in only one edition; Learn this grammar links to the lessons that explain its labels. Below comes the lexicon entry, whose button Where this word is used lists every verse with that number, book by book, in the translation you are reading.

To set the original beside every translation in the app, Korean and English, select a verse and tap Compare; Word study then opens the Original tab. To keep the original in view as you read, turn on Show original words in Text settings or Settings, and each verse will have its words and glosses beneath it.

The Greek and Hebrew courses under Learn, thirty lessons each, read real verses from the same data; tap a word in a lesson for a card with its grammar and lexicon entry and a button that speaks it with the device's modern Greek or Hebrew voice. Search results, topic pages and links like the ones in this guide open the same lexicon entries, and Offline reading in Settings can save the study data for use without a connection. The credit at the foot of the Original tab links to STEPBible's website, which offers much that the app leaves out, such as the full record of textual variants.

Using it well

Read the translation first and get the sense of the passage; then choose the one word you are curious about. Look at its gloss and grammar, read the definition for its range of meaning, open Where this word is used and begin with the same book and author, then let the context of your passage decide. What a Commentary Is and How to Read One explains how commentaries fit alongside.

Try it on John 21, where the risen Lord asks Peter three times whether he loves him.

Jesus asked a third time, “Simon son of John, do you love Me?” Peter was deeply hurt that Jesus had asked him a third time, “Do you love Me?” “Lord, You know all things,” he replied. “You know I love You.”

John 21:17

English has one verb, love, all the way through; the Original tab shows two. In verses 15 and 16 Jesus asks with agapaō and Peter answers with phileō; the third time Jesus too uses phileō. The English glosses mark the change, love for the one and dearly love for the other, though the BSB itself says love throughout. Many interpreters have found meaning in the change and read Peter's heart in the difference between the two words; others think John simply varied his vocabulary.

The tab lets you weigh this. John says that the Father loves the Son with agapaō in 3:35 and with phileō in 5:20. Agapaō also describes people who loved the darkness (3:19) and Demas, who loved this world (2 Timothy 4:10). In this same passage John alternates two verbs for feeding the flock, two words for lambs and sheep and, in verse 17, two verbs for knowing, and the lexicon itself hedges. None of this settles the question, but it warns against hanging much on the difference. Read either way, the heart of the scene is plain: the disciple who denied his Lord three times is asked three times, and three times given the flock to feed. What is love? takes up the Bible's teaching on love.

If the labels are new to you, begin with The Greek alphabet (1) or The Hebrew alphabet (1), or work towards Reading Psalm 23:1–3. A little Greek or Hebrew makes no one a translator, but it shows how much care a good translation holds. And all this looking at words comes back to a prayer:

Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from Your law.

Psalm 119:18