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Glossary

A study will say a word is a hapax legomenon, or that MACULA gives the domain as such-and-such, and carry on. This page is where to find out what that meant without leaving the sentence for long.

Entries here are deliberately short — one or two sentences, enough to get you moving again. Where a term has a page of its own on this site, the entry ends with an arrow to it, and that page, not this one, is the real explanation. Where no arrow follows, the entry is all there is to say.

Reading and interpreting

Apocalyptic to Hermeneutics

Apocalyptic — A genre, not a subject: visionary literature that discloses God's settled purpose through symbol, number and cosmic imagery. Daniel, Zechariah and Revelation are its biblical instances, and reading its symbols as flat description is the commonest way to misread it. → Reading by genre

Antitype — The fulfilment that a type points forward to. Melchizedek is the type; the priesthood of Christ is the antitype. See typology.

Chiasm, chiastic — A passage arranged so its parts mirror around a centre, A-B- C-B'-A'. That throws the weight onto the middle term. 2 Peter 3:8 is one in Greek — one day … a thousand years / a thousand years … one day. → A day is as a thousand years

Dispensationalism — Reading Scripture as God dealing with humanity through successive administrations, and holding that the promises made to Israel are not transferred to the Church. It is this site's default framework. The name comes from Paul's own word for the present arrangement: οἰκονομία (oikonomia, G3622), the household-management of a thing, its administration. Ephesians 3:9 applies it to "the plan of the mystery". An age with its own terms, opened at the cross, and distinct from the age before it and the one after. → Israel and the Church

Eisegesis — Reading a meaning into a text that is not in it. Usually the result of arriving with the conclusion already settled. The opposite failure to exegesis. Its prophetic form is sometimes called "newspaper exegesis": starting from the day's headlines and working back to a verse that seems to match.

Eschatology — The study of last things: death, resurrection, judgement, the return of Christ, the millennium. → Last Things

Exegesis — Drawing out what a passage meant to the people who first received it, before asking what it means now. On this site it always comes first. → Ask these questions, in order

Halakha — Jewish legal ruling: the accumulated body of how a commandment is to be kept in practice, as distinct from the commandment itself.

Hermeneutics — The principles by which a text is interpreted and applied. Exegesis asks what a passage meant; hermeneutics asks what follows from it.

Inclusio to Typology

Inclusio — A unit of text bracketed by the same word or phrase at its start and end. The bracket marks where the unit begins and ends, and often names its theme. Psalm 8 both opens and closes with "Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!" (WEB).

Koinonia — Greek κοινωνία (koinōnia, G2842), "fellowship, sharing, participation" — the common life of believers and their share in Christ (Acts 2:42).

Liturgy — The fixed order and wording of public worship. A neutral term: synagogue and church both have one, whether or not anybody has written it down.

Midrash — Jewish interpretive writing that expounds a biblical text, often by story and association rather than by argument. Evidence for how a text was heard, not a witness to what it says. → Jewish sources

Pericope — A self-contained unit of text — one story, one saying — as against a chapter, which is a medieval navigation aid laid over the top. This site's database carries the Masoretic paragraph markers, so a unit can be read where the text divides it rather than where the printers did. → The two databases

Propitiation — The turning aside of God's wrath by a sacrifice that bears it. Distinguished from expiation, which covers the sin without naming what the sin provoked.

Protoevangelium — "First gospel": Genesis 3:15, the promise that the woman's offspring will crush the serpent's head, read as the earliest announcement of Christ.

Seder — The ordered Passover meal — seder is Hebrew for "order" — whose sequence of cups, bread and telling is the frame the Last Supper accounts assume. → The four cups of Passover

Soteriology — The study of salvation: how God saves, on what basis, and what is secured by it. → Salvation

Typology — Reading a person, institution or event as a divinely intended pattern of something later: the type, fulfilled in its antitype. Sound where Scripture itself draws the line, guesswork where it does not. → Prophecy essentials

Words in the original languages

These are the layers of information attached to each word of the Hebrew and Greek text, and the page that owns them works Genesis 1:1 through every one.

Alignment to Hapax legomenon

Alignment — Which original word each English word is rendering. It turns "which Hebrew word is this?" from a guess into a lookup, and it is the only thing on this list that links a translation to its source word by word. In Genesis 1:1 all four words of "In the beginning" align to one Hebrew word, בְּרֵאשִׁית. → Alignment

Construct state — Hebrew's way of saying "X of Y" — the first noun takes a shortened bound form rather than a preposition. Bet ("house") plus lehem ("bread") gives Bethlehem, "house of bread".

Coreference — Annotation recording which word refers back to which earlier one: who "he" is. The "her" of Matthew 1:19 is tagged as pointing back to "the mother" of verse 18. Coverage is partial, so a blank means not annotated, never no referent.

Gloss — A very short English equivalent, for orientation only: בָּרָא is glossed "he.created". A gloss is not a translation and not a definition — it is a label, so you can tell which word you are looking at. → Gloss

Hapax legomenon — A word occurring only once in a given body of text — θεόπνευστος (theopneustos, G2315, "God-breathed") at 2 Timothy 3:16 is one for the New Testament. Weight it carefully: with no second occurrence there is no internal control on what the author meant by it.

Lemma to Surface form

Lemma, lemmatised — The lemma is a word's dictionary form, the form you would look up. A lemmatised text is one where somebody has identified that form for every word. That is what makes a real word study possible. You can ask where else an author uses a word, whatever shape it was inflected into. ἀγάπην, ἀγάπῃ and ἀγάπη are three shapes of one lemma, ἀγάπη. → Lemma

Morphology, parsing — What grammatical form a particular occurrence is in, written as a code: Vqp3ms is a verb, qal stem, perfect, 3rd person masculine singular. It matters whenever an argument turns on the form rather than the word. → Morphology

Semantic domain — A code placing a word in a category of meaning, from a scholarly classification (Louw-Nida for Greek, SDBH for Hebrew). It answers what a dictionary cannot: which other words mean something like this one, including words that share no letters with it — Louw-Nida 23.93 holds ζάω ("live", G2198), ἀνίστημι ("rise", G450) and ἔγερσις ("resurrection", G1454) together. → Semantic domain

Strong's number — A number identifying a word in Strong's Concordance (1890), H for Hebrew and G for Greek: H1254 is בָּרָא, G26 is ἀγάπη. Sound as an identifier and unreliable as a definition — its glosses are Victorian, but its numbers are the common index that lets different resources talk about the same word. → Strong's numbers

Surface form — The word exactly as it stands in the text, inflected, with its vowel points and accents — בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית in Genesis 1:1, where the lemma is רֵאשִׁית. What you read, and nearly useless for searching. → Surface form

Texts, manuscripts and witnesses

Codex to Ketiv and Qere

Codex — A book with leaves bound at a spine, as against a rolled scroll. Christians took it up early, which is why the oldest complete Bibles are codices. → Codex Sinaiticus

Dead Sea Scrolls — Hebrew biblical manuscripts copied c. 250 BC–AD 68 and found at Qumran: a thousand years older than the oldest complete Masoretic manuscripts, and the only pre-Christian Hebrew witnesses this site holds. They are fragmentary, and a reading inside square brackets is an editor's reconstruction rather than manuscript evidence. → The Dead Sea Scrolls

Ketiv and Qere — The Masoretes' way of correcting a text without altering it. Ketiv (כְּתִיב, "what is written") is the consonantal text as received; Qere (קְרֵי, "what is read") is what the scribes marked to be read aloud instead. Neither is discarded — the written form stays on the page and the spoken correction sits in the margin, which is why a Hebrew Bible can preserve a reading its own tradition thought wrong.

Which of the two a printed edition puts in the running text is an editorial decision, and the two Hebrew texts on this site made it differently. The Westminster Leningrad Codex follows the Qere; the unfoldingWord Hebrew Bible deliberately does not — "in order to avoid subjectivity, the text of the UHB uses the Ketiv of the WLC" (unfoldingWord). That single choice is why the two differ in roughly 1.5% of verses, and this site's database keeps the 930 Qere readings as notes attached to the verses they belong to, so both are visible.

LXX to Septuagint

LXX — The standard abbreviation for the Septuagint, from the seventy translators of the tradition behind it.

Masoretic Text, MT — The standard Hebrew Bible text, transmitted with vowel pointing, accents and scribal notes by the Masoretes. This site's copy is the Westminster Leningrad Codex — a single manuscript dated 1008, not an eclectic reconstruction, so it carries that one codex's idiosyncrasies with it. → Hebrew Old Testament

NA28 — Nestle-Aland 28th edition, the standard critical Greek New Testament in scholarly use. Held on external storage rather than in this repository's own database.

Peshitta — The standard Syriac Bible: a real, catalogued ancient version, and a witness in its own right.

Samaritan Pentateuch — An independent Torah-only text tradition preserved by the Samaritan community. A second witness to compare on disputed Torah readings, and one carrying its own theological commitments. → Hebrew Old Testament

SBLGNT — The Society of Biblical Literature Greek New Testament: an openly licensed critical edition, and this site's default Greek New Testament text. → Greek New Testament

Septuagint — The Greek translation of the Old Testament made from the third century BC onward. It matters far beyond translation history because the New Testament authors usually quote it, and it sometimes reads differently from the Hebrew — Hebrews 10:5 quotes "a body you have prepared for me" where the Masoretic text has "ears". → Septuagint

Targum to WLC

Targum — An Aramaic rendering of the Hebrew Scriptures, often expansive enough to be paraphrase and commentary at once. Evidence for how a passage was understood in the synagogue.

Textual criticism — Working out what a text originally said by comparing the manuscripts that carry it, and saying openly where they disagree. → Textual criticism

Uncial — Majuscule script written without spaces between words, used in the great fourth-century codices, and the reason they are sometimes called "the uncials".

Vorlage — The source text a translator was actually working from — a distinct question from what the translation says.

Versification — How an edition divides a book into numbered chapters and verses. The divisions are not part of the original text — they were added centuries later — and different traditions drew them in different places, so the same reference can name different verses in different editions.

Hebrew Bibles and English Bibles disagree most often over two things. Psalm superscriptions, where Hebrew usually counts the title as verse 1 and English usually does not. And where a chapter ends: what an English Bible calls Joel 2:28 is Joel 3:1 in Hebrew, and Jonah 1:17 is Jonah 2:1.

This matters here because the two Hebrew texts on this site are not numbered the same way. The Westminster Leningrad Codex uses the Hebrew scheme. The unfoldingWord Hebrew Bible deliberately uses the English one, and unfoldingWord say so plainly. The UHB "uses the versification scheme of the ULT instead of that of the OSHB (which is based on the WLC scheme common for Hebrew Bibles)", which "may make some resources that are keyed to the WLC more difficult to use with the Hebrew text" (unfoldingWord). Around 1,500 verses are affected, mostly in Joel, 1 Chronicles, 1 Kings, Numbers, Job, Ezekiel and Malachi. → Hebrew Old Testament

WLC — Westminster Leningrad Codex. See Masoretic Text.

The datasets behind this site

Studies here cite the dataset a claim came out of, so these names turn up in "Sources" sections constantly. What they are, and which of them a query tool can actually see, is set out in full on About our datasets.

BHSA to morphhb

BHSA — Decades of Hebrew linguistic analysis from the Eep Talstra Centre, VU Amsterdam, with deeper clause hierarchy than anything else held here: it can say which clause hangs under which, where MACULA labels a clause's own role and stops. Catalogued and licence-checked but not wired into any query tool, since MACULA already covers what the studies ask for. → BHSA

bible-text.db — The database the studies query: every ingested text, per-word morphology, cross-references, alignment, Dead Sea Scroll variants. Built from open and non-commercial sources inside this repository, and rebuilt from scratch rather than hand-curated, so any claim resting on it can be re-derived. → The two databases

Licence tiers — Every source falls into one of three, and the tier decides how it may be used. Open, cited and quoted freely. Restricted non-commercial, usable while this site does not monetise, and flagged by name. And quotation-only, commercially published, cited with a short attributed quotation and never reproduced at length. → Three tiers, one rule

Louw-Nida — The standard semantic-domain classification for New Testament Greek, by Johannes Louw and Eugene Nida. It is where a Greek word's semantic domain code comes from, and its codes are two-part: ἀγάπη ("love", G26) is 25.43.

MACULA — Open scholarly annotations published by Clear Bible, one set for Hebrew and one for Greek, and this site's main source for both. It contains no Bible of its own: it carries a row for every word of one, saying what that word is — lemma, parsing, gloss, semantic domain, clause syntax. For בָּרָ֣א in Genesis 1:1 that row reads lemma בָּרָא, parsing Vqp3ms, gloss "he.created", domain 002002002005. When a study says "MACULA gives the domain as…", this dataset is what it means. → MACULA

MARBLE — The United Bible Societies project supplying the word-sense data MACULA carries, including the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew. Every domain code quoted on this site traces back to it, Greek 25.43 and Hebrew 002001002022 alike.

morphhb — The Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible: the Westminster Leningrad Codex marked up with lemma and morphology, and the source this site's Hebrew word studies are required to work from. Genesis 1:1's בָּרָ֣א arrives with Strong's 1254 a and morphology HVqp3ms, and nothing more: text and tagging only — no gloss, no syntax, no semantic domains. → morphhb

Scripture links: quotation-greek, inner-biblical, allusion-lemma, quotation-crosslang, quotation-hebrew — The five kinds of connection this site derives between passages, kept apart and never merged into a single score, because they are not the same kind of evidence. The first three are textual facts; the fourth reads the Greek against the Hebrew through a vocabulary learned from the Septuagint; the fifth is a judgement. → Five kinds of link

SDBH — The Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, the Hebrew counterpart to Louw-Nida, and the source of Hebrew domain codes here. Its codes are nested numeric paths rather than two-part numbers: 002001002022 gathers שָׂמַח, שׂוּשׂ and גִּיל, three verbs for rejoicing.

STEPBible — Datasets from Tyndale House, Cambridge: Strong's-tagged texts, lexicons, morphology and cross-references. Held as raw files but not ingested, so the query tools cannot see it — check it by hand before concluding that a word is unattested. → STEPBible

study-notes.db — The second database, built from commercially published study Bibles and commentary. Because that material is quotation-only it is built and kept entirely outside this public repository, and it is used to test a reading already reached from the text, never to form one. → The two databases

TWOT — The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. Its bare facts are open enough to use freely: a Strong's number pointing to a root, lemma and one-line gloss, as H2617 חֶ֫סֶד (ḥesed, H2617) points to root 698a. Its discussion prose is not, and sits in the quotation-only tier. → TWOT: one source, split across two tiers

unfoldingWord, ULT — A translation organisation's Hebrew, Greek and English datasets. The ULT English translation is aligned to the original texts word by word. That is the one thing here no other source supplies. It is what shows "One and Only" at John 3:16 to be three English words for one Greek one, μονογενῆ. → unfoldingWord

See also