Hebrew
Most of the Old Testament is Biblical Hebrew. Hebrew words are built from roots and patterns, and their meaning depends on grammar, syntax, idiom and context—not merely a root definition.
HEBREW • ARAMAIC • GREEK
Original-Language Bible Lab
The Old Testament is principally Hebrew with portions in Aramaic; the New Testament is Greek. This study layer connects English verses to lemmas, transliterations, lexical definitions and tagged word occurrences.
19,569lexicon entries
422,537tagged word tokens
8,723Hebrew/Aramaic records
10,846Greek records
Aramaic
Portions of Daniel and Ezra and a small number of other expressions are Aramaic. Closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic became a major language of Jewish life in the Second Temple period.
Koine Greek
The New Testament is written in the common Greek of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. A Greek word may have several senses; usage in the sentence and wider corpus determines which sense fits.
How to find a word’s real meaning
- Identify the actual word form in the verse, not an English word you assume must be underneath it.
- Find the lemma—the dictionary form—and morphology.
- Study the semantic range across ancient usage.
- Read every relevant occurrence, especially by the same author.
- Check the sentence and discourse; grammar narrows possible meanings.
- Compare ancient translations and textual witnesses when they matter.
- Then translate. A lexicon is evidence, not a substitute for interpretation.
Lexical data
The local word-study database incorporates open lexical/tagging resources associated with STEPBible/Tyndale House work, including Greek material based on corrected Abbott-Smith and Hebrew resources related to BDB, together with tagged verse occurrences. Those data are made available under their stated open licenses and are used here with attribution.