---
title: "Glossary"
category: "other"
description: "Short definitions of the terms these studies use — interpretive vocabulary, original-language vocabulary, manuscripts, and the datasets behind the site — each linked to the page that explains it in full."
tags: ["glossary", "reference", "method/word-study", "method/textual-criticism"]
draft: false
date_created: 2026-09-05
date_modified: 2026-10-22
ai_provider_models:
  - anthropic/claude-opus-5
  - anthropic/claude-opus-5.5
  - anthropic/claude-sonnet-5
---

# 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](#reading-and-interpreting)
- [Words in the original languages](#words-in-the-original-languages)
- [Texts, manuscripts and witnesses](#texts-manuscripts-and-witnesses)
- [The datasets behind this site](#the-datasets-behind-this-site)

## Reading and interpreting

### Apocalyptic to Hermeneutics

**Apocalyptic**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/how-to-read-the-bible/#reading-by-genre)

**Antitype**{ #antitype } — The fulfilment that a type points forward to. Melchizedek is the type;
the priesthood of Christ is the antitype. See [typology](#typology).

**Chiasm, chiastic**{ #chiasm } — 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](last-things/day-is-a-
thousand-years.md)

**Dispensationalism**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/israel-and-church/israel-and-the-church/#what-scripture-means-by-a-mystery)

**Eisegesis**{ #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](#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**{ #eschatology } — The study of last things: death, resurrection, judgement, the
return of Christ, the millennium.
→ [Last Things](https://the-way.lewy.au/last-things/)

**Exegesis**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/how-to-read-the-bible/#ask-these-questions-in-order)

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

**Hermeneutics**{ #hermeneutics } — The principles by which a text is interpreted and applied.
[Exegesis](#exegesis) asks what a passage meant; hermeneutics asks what follows from it.

### Inclusio to Typology

**Inclusio**{ #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**{ #koinonia } — Greek κοινωνία (*koinōnia*, G2842), "fellowship, sharing, participation" — the
common life of believers and their share in Christ (Acts 2:42).

**Liturgy**{ #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**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/resources/jewish-sources/)

**Pericope**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/about/about-our-datasets/#the-two-databases-and-what-is-in-them)

**Propitiation**{ #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**{ #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**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/feasts/last-supper-four-cups/#historical-context-the-four-cups-of-passover)

**Soteriology**{ #soteriology } — The study of salvation: how God saves, on what basis, and what is
secured by it. → [Salvation](https://the-way.lewy.au/salvation/)

**Typology**{ #typology } — Reading a person, institution or event as a divinely intended pattern of
something later: the *type*, fulfilled in its [antitype](#antitype). Sound where Scripture itself
draws the line, guesswork where it does not.
→ [Prophecy essentials](https://the-way.lewy.au/last-things/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**{ #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, <span dir="rtl">בְּרֵאשִׁית</span>.
→ [Alignment](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#alignment)

**Construct state**{ #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**{ #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**{ #gloss } — A very short English equivalent, for orientation only:
<span dir="rtl">בָּרָא</span> 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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#gloss)

**Hapax legomenon**{ #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**{ #lemma } — 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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#lemma-and-what-lemmatised-means)

**Morphology, parsing**{ #morphology } — 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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#morphology-parsing)

**Semantic domain**{ #semantic-domain } — A code placing a word in a category of meaning, from a
scholarly classification ([Louw-Nida](#louw-nida) for Greek, [SDBH](#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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#semantic-domain)

**Strong's number**{ #strongs-number } — A number identifying a word in *Strong's Concordance*
(1890), H for Hebrew and G for Greek: H1254 is <span dir="rtl">בָּרָא</span>, 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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#strongs-numbers)

**Surface form**{ #surface-form } — The word exactly as it stands in the text, inflected, with its
vowel points and accents — <span dir="rtl">בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית</span> in Genesis 1:1, where the lemma is
<span dir="rtl">רֵאשִׁית</span>. What you read, and nearly useless for searching.
→ [Surface form](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#surface-form)

## Texts, manuscripts and witnesses

### Codex to Ketiv and Qere

**Codex**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/ancient-texts-manuscripts/#16-codex-sinaiticus-c-ad-330-360)

**Dead Sea Scrolls**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/ancient-texts-manuscripts/#1-the-dead-sea-scrolls-c-250-bc-ad-68)

**Ketiv and Qere**{ #ketiv-qere } — The Masoretes' way of correcting a text without altering it.
*Ketiv* (<span dir="rtl">כְּתִיב</span>, "what is written") is the consonantal text as received;
*Qere* (<span dir="rtl">קְרֵי</span>, "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](https://git.door43.org/unfoldingWord/hbo_uhb)). 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**{ #lxx } — The standard abbreviation for the [Septuagint](#septuagint), from the seventy
translators of the tradition behind it.

**Masoretic Text, MT**{ #masoretic-text } — 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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/translations/#hebrew-old-testament)

**NA28**{ #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**{ #peshitta } — The standard Syriac Bible: a real, catalogued ancient version, and a
witness in its own right.

**Samaritan Pentateuch**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/translations/#hebrew-old-testament)

**SBLGNT**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/translations/#greek-new-testament)

**Septuagint**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/translations/#septuagint-greek-old-testament)

### Targum to WLC

**Targum**{ #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**{ #textual-criticism } — Working out what a text originally said by comparing
the manuscripts that carry it, and saying openly where they disagree.
→ [Textual criticism](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/ancient-texts-manuscripts/#textual-criticism-how-we-actually-know)

**Uncial**{ #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**{ #vorlage } — The source text a translator was actually working from — a distinct
question from what the translation says.

**Versification**{ #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](https://git.door43.org/unfoldingWord/hbo_uhb)). Around 1,500 verses are affected,
mostly in Joel, 1 Chronicles, 1 Kings, Numbers, Job, Ezekiel and Malachi. → [Hebrew Old
Testament](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/translations/#hebrew-old-testament)

**WLC**{ #wlc } — Westminster Leningrad Codex. See [Masoretic Text](#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](https://the-way.lewy.au/about/about-our-datasets/).

### BHSA to morphhb

**BHSA**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#bhsa-eep-talstra-centre-vu-amsterdam)

**`bible-text.db`**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/about/about-our-datasets/#the-two-databases-and-what-is-in-them)

**Licence tiers**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/about/about-our-datasets/#three-tiers-one-rule)

**Louw-Nida**{ #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](#semantic-domain) code
comes from, and its codes are two-part: ἀγάπη ("love", G26) is `25.43`.

**MACULA**{ #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 <span dir="rtl">בָּרָ֣א</span> in Genesis 1:1 that row reads lemma
<span dir="rtl">בָּרָא</span>, parsing `Vqp3ms`, gloss "he.created", domain `002002002005`. When a
study says "MACULA gives the domain as…", this dataset is what it means.
→ [MACULA](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#macula-clear-bible)

**MARBLE**{ #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**{ #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 <span dir="rtl">בָּרָ֣א</span> arrives with Strong's `1254 a` and morphology `HVqp3ms`,
and nothing more: text and tagging only — no gloss, no syntax, no semantic domains.
→ [morphhb](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#open-scriptures-hebrew-bible-morphhb)

### Scripture links to unfoldingWord, ULT

**Scripture links: `quotation-greek`, `inner-biblical`, `allusion-lemma`, `quotation-crosslang`, `quotation-hebrew`**{ #scripture-links } —
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](https://the-way.lewy.au/about/how-we-cross-reference/#five-kinds-of-link-kept-separate)

**SDBH**{ #sdbh } — The Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, the Hebrew counterpart to
[Louw-Nida](#louw-nida), and the source of Hebrew domain codes here. Its codes are nested numeric
paths rather than two-part numbers: `002001002022` gathers <span dir="rtl">שָׂמַח</span>,
<span dir="rtl">שׂוּשׂ</span> and <span dir="rtl">גִּיל</span>, three verbs for rejoicing.

**STEPBible**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/#stepbible-tyndale-house-cambridge)

**`study-notes.db`**{ #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](https://the-way.lewy.au/about/about-our-datasets/#the-two-databases-and-what-is-in-them)

**TWOT**{ #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 <span
dir="rtl">חֶ֫סֶד</span> (*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](about/about-our-datasets.md#twot-
one-source-split-across-two-tiers)

**unfoldingWord, ULT**{ #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](scripture/original-language-
data.md#unfoldingword-uhb-ugnt-ult)

## See also

- [Reading the Original-Language Data](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/original-language-data/) — the layers above,
  worked through Genesis 1:1 one at a time
- [About Our Datasets](https://the-way.lewy.au/about/about-our-datasets/) — every source, its licence tier, and which
  database it lands in
- [How to Read the Bible](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/how-to-read-the-bible/) — the questions that come before any
  of this vocabulary is useful
- [Bible Translations & Source Texts](https://the-way.lewy.au/scripture/translations/) — which text to trust, and why the
  editions differ
- [FAQ](https://the-way.lewy.au/faq/) — the questions readers arrive with, as against the words they get stuck on