if your pastor is telling you a Hebrew word has a single English meaning, they're almost certainly lying to you. (A thread.) https://twitter.com/ashleymeaster/status/1253400802305155072

(On one hand, yes, do your own research. On the other hand, I'd be really careful about looking up Hebrew words in isolation, because like any language, it's a fabric and one individual thread can give you a lot of mistaken understandings.)

(And Christians discovering online Hebrew dictionaries always seems to lead to the wackiest, Ancient-Aliens-style interpretations, like "Eve had a glowing snake coming out of her nether regions!!!")

But that said, I'd still rather people look up words than just trusting some pastor about What The Hebrew Actually Says.

Here's why you should be suspicious of anyone telling you a Hebrew word in the Tanakh/OT has a single meaning:

Okay, so, Hebrew is based on a system of consonant roots with a sort of general meaning that then can be made more specific with prefixes, postfixes, infixes, etc.

Also vowels but it's written without vowels (sort of--some consonants double as vowels).

Classical Hebrew also doesn't have tenses in the way we have them in English. It has complete and incomplete action instead. (It has a system of verb forms that indicate causality, intensity, active/passive, etc.)

So, like, the main thing about Hebrew is it doesn't work like English does.

English is an Indo-European language. Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic language. They don't have common roots, and they don't have much in common.

There's also lexicon size to consider. The Tanakh has ~8500 unique consonantal roots. (Depending on how you want to parse them, somewhere between 400 and 1000 of those only occur once, which means that to know what some MEAN, we have to try to find their relatives in other langs)

For contrast, English has more than 1,000,000 words, though only ~150,000 of those are in current use. (And it's not directly comparable, since multiple Hebrew words are derived from most roots.)

Still, 8500 vs 150,000 is a HUGE difference.

And where that often plays out is in precision.

There are a lot of reasons that English is the modern lingua franca for technology. A lot of them have to do with colonialism.

But some of them have to do with English's ability to expand easily, and its precision.

English is an omnivorous language: it cheerfully absorbs words from other languages, and that tends to mean we have a LOT of synonyms. It's not an efficient or mathematically elegant language. There's a lot of redundancy.

But we tend to turn around and undo that redundancy.

That is, we *don't* treat synonyms as completely interchangeable.

We give them subtle distinctions, shades of meaning.

Consider "giggle" vs "chuckle."

Now, all languages have synonyms with subtle distinctions. It's not a unique feature of English.

But most languages don't have as massive a lexicon, so they have fewer *areas* with a lot of synonyms.

(On the difficulty of actually determining lexicon size: https://blog.ititranslates.com/2018/03/07/which-language-is-richest-in-words/)

So as English speakers, we're used to having a lot of words that mostly just mean one thing, and in fact, may be very specific about that one thing. "Giggle" means a type of laugh, and that's pretty much it.

Because Classical Hebrew has such a small lexicon, most of its words have to cover a lot more territory.

It's not just about lexicon size or difference in structure or tenses, either.

It's about words not *having* exact analogues.

So, the way we teach/learn languages usually involves a dictionary/lexicon. If you've ever had a language textbook, it almost ALWAYS has a list of words and their English counterparts in the back.

And it's usually predominantly a 1:1 relationship. Hola = hello.

And it's easy to get the idea from that that The Way Language Works is there's a Platonic Ideal Concept of "Chair" out there and languages all just have a different word for it. (Maybe multiple permutations, but still pretty 1:1.)

That's not really how meaning works, though. If the whole of human meaning is a piece of paper, it's not a universal grid where each square is filled in in a different color by different languages.

It's a continuous sheet, and words are more like paint splotches on it.

And different languages have splotches of different sizes in different places. There are different little spaces that don't get covered in each, and different places where a lot of splotches overlap.

The more closely related ones have almost but not quite identical patterns.

So those word lists in the back of our textbooks give us a really distorted view. Basically, they mean that you're hanging your understanding of the words in the language you're learning on an English framework.

And over time, through immersion or through reading a lot and seeing how those words are actually *used*, that framework gets reworked, but you're still starting from a place of thinking as if everything has a 1:1 relationship.

And if you're learning French or Spanish or German, languages that are closely related to English, it's not that big a deal. There are still things that don't translate, but most words have a similar footprint to a word in English, because they evolved from the same source word.

With languages that aren't related, though, that evolved in different time periods in distant parts of the world, those footprints are often very different. But if there's *any* overlap, they get paired in those lexicons and wordlists, because we need SOMETHING to translate them.

But if you look at how they're *used*, they aren't used in the same way.

I think I've used this example before, but it's a particularly telling one, so I'm going to use it again.

Peace vs. shalom

I'm not going to go into detail about the etymology of the word "peace." You can look it up, because it is relevant, but I'm going to talk about how it's used in English.

In idioms, in cliches, etc.

Peace and quiet
I've made my peace with it
He's at peace now
War and peace
Peaceful slumber
Rest in peace
Peace of mind
Hold your peace
Keeps the peace
Peace offering

etc.

So let's take a look at what all of these uses of peace have in common:

Peace and quiet (absence of noise)
I've made my peace with it (resignation, absence of resistance)
He's at peace now (death, absence of life)
War and peace (opposites; absence of war)

Peaceful slumber (absence of disturbance)
Rest in peace (death, absence of life)
Peace of mind (absence of worry)
Hold your peace (silence, absence of speech)
Keeps the peace (absence of conflict)
Peace offering (attempt to create absence of conflict)

"Peace" in English largely indicates an absence, whether of strife, of speech, of worry, or of life.

Now let's look at "shalom," which usually gets paired, in those word lists, with "peace."

If I want to ask how you are, I ask you how your shalom is.
If you're sick, I wish you a refuah shlemah, a complete healing.
To pay is leshalem.
Perfect is mushlam.

So it refers to health/wellbeing. Also completeness. Also being paid up, having your debt filled. And perfection.

Basically, if one is going to go by how it's actually *used,* shalom means something much closer to "wholeness" than to "peace."

It's not quite the opposite of English's peace-as-absence, but it doesn't really cover the same meaning-territory at all.

That's an easy one, and most biblical lexicons do actually include the "health/wholeness" meanings of the root.

They're not going to help you out with which term for "cry" gets used when and the connotations of it, though.