The below outlines multiple reasons why interlinear Bibles, together with some background study, are a great aid to understanding the Bible better and in particular hearing God our Father’s Voice.
Hearing God’s Voice
Adam at Creation
God made mankind in His Own Image, as the culmination (the telos) of the Six Days of Creation (Gen. 1). This was the great restoration from what had been formless and void (Gen. 1:1) by Elohim God (Elohim, is the Hebrew word for The Most High, and is in the plural form).
In the second telling of the great story of Creation (Gen. 2), we learn that the Lord God directly encounters the image of His Creation, man. Lord God is given to us in Hebrew as Yahweh Elohim. (Some translations have it as “Jehovah;” it is the transliteration of the Hebrew four-consonant personal name of God, the Tetragrammaton, YHWH in our English script). Here are the first words that Adam hears from His Lord:
15 And Jehovah [Yahweh, or Lord] God taketh the man, and causeth him to rest in the garden of Eden, to serve it, and to keep it.
16 And Jehovah [Yahweh, or Lord] God layeth a charge on the man, saying, `Of every tree of the garden eating thou dost eat;
17 and of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou dost not eat of it, for in the day of thine eating of it — dying thou dost die.’
Gen. 2, Young’s Literal Translation, YLT
From such encounter and instruction, Adam begins his work of caretaking of Eden by taking an inventory of God’s Creation, categorizing by naming each being presented to Adam by God, including the special one, Eve, who had been crafted by God from Adam’s own being.
As we learn next, Eve, then Adam, she deceived, he willfully rebelling (1 Timothy 2:14), mankind, God’s Image, sins against God, crossing the boundary that had been established by God’s Own Voice.
Upon the Fall of Adam
Immediately upon the Fall in Gen. 3, Adam and Eve heard the sound of the Lord (Yahweh, aka Jehovah) God in the Garden seeking them:
8 And they hear the sound of Jehovah God walking up and down in the garden at the breeze of the day, and the man and his wife hide themselves from the face of Jehovah God in the midst of the trees of the garden.
9 And Jehovah God calleth unto the man, and saith to him, `Where [art] thou?’
10 and he saith, `Thy sound I have heard in the garden, and I am afraid, for I am naked, and I hide myself.’
Genesis 3, Young’s Literal Translation (YLT)
The first moment of their encounter as fallen beings, the highest form of God’s Creation, those who were made in God’s Image, resulted in their hiding from the presence, and even the sound, of God’s Voice. And so it has been ever since: the darkness hates the light and flees from the light lest its deeds be made evident:
19 `And this is the judgment, that the light hath come to the world, and men did love the darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil;
20 for every one who is doing wicked things hateth the light, and doth not come unto the light, that his works may not be detected;
John 3, YLT
And even at the final, awful judgment, the doomed men will plead for the mountains to bury them alive, a horrible form of expiration, instead of having to hear God’s Voice of final Judgement:
15 and the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich, and the chiefs of thousands, and the mighty, and every servant, and every freeman, hid themselves in the dens, and in the rocks of the mountains,
16 and they say to the mountains and to the rocks, `Fall upon us, and hide us from the face of Him who is sitting upon the throne, and from the anger of the Lamb,’
17 because come did the great day of His anger, and who is able to stand?
Revelation 6, YLT
Hearing God’s Voice upon Regeneration by God
As in Gen. 1, God again restores a formless, void, utterly lightless Creation by shinning forth His Light into darkness that had been given new life, with new eyes to see:
1 In the beginning of God’s preparing the heavens and the earth —
2 the earth hath existed waste and void, and darkness [is] on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttering on the face of the waters,
3 and God saith, `Let light be;’ and light is.
4 And God seeth the light that [it is] good, and God separateth between the light and the darkness,
5 and God calleth to the light `Day,’ and to the darkness He hath called `Night;’ and there is an evening, and there is a morning — day one.
Gen. 1, YLT
That Light of the new Creation, was The Logos, The Word, The Revelation (and The Lamb), of God manifest in Jesus, who came into the world (John 1:4). That Light enlightened His Own (John 1:9), but “the world” (lit. kosmos, the organized systems of the earth, both political and religious) hated the flight, fled from the light, because their deeds were evil (John 3:19-20). Yet, to His Own they (we) saw (have seen) The Light (John 5:35; 8:12; 9:5; 12:35-35, 46f; John 11:43).
With such Light of Life, comes again, the very Voice of God, which raises us from our tomb, as with Lazarus (John 5:25, 28). His Sheep hear His Voice (John 10:3-5, 16, 27). Perhaps we might dare to say, we, His Sheep, re-hear His Voice, and are drawn toward it, neither hiding, as did Adam, nor closing our ears in hatred as did the religious leaders of the New Testament (Luke 23:23), nor as will the condemned at the Final Judgment (Rev. 6:15-17).
And the blessed promise is that we will one day hear in direct audible form our Father’s Voice again (Rev. 21:3). In this period between the moment we’ve been granted a resurrected spiritual life (born again, John 3:3) until that final moment of spacetime of this fallen world, we can hear Him in the Words He has given us, enabled by the Holy Spirit of God (John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7).
Our Innermost Longing: To Hear Our Father’s Voice
And so, our great opportunity now, and great longing, is that we may hear, as richly, as completely, as deeply as we are capable, our Father’s Voice. Thus we come to the present discussion of certain limitations of Bible translations, and the corresponding merits of referencing Interlinear Bibles and Koine Greek-to-English lexicons (a lexicon is simply a cross-language dictionary, whereby in our interest, we ‘look up’ a Koine Greek word from the Bible and find the semantic range of possible English translations of it).
Koine Greek Language
Koine is the form of Greek that was prevalent for the period encompassing the New Testament, from ca. 300 B.C. to ca. 300 A.D.; it is related to, but distinct from, of the various forms of “classical” Greek of Homer to Socrates / Plato / Aristotle and the famous Greek playwrights of that era, and is also distinguished from “modern” Greek.
Koine became the broadly known and used common second language through much of the world of the Bible–Jewish, Greek, Roman, and other languages and dialects throughout what we know today as the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and beyond into Asia itself. It became the language of commerce and trade.
Koine also became the language of the Bible. In approximately 200 B.C., the Hebrew Old Testament was translated by Bible and language scholars of the day into Greek in a publication known as the Septuagint, abbreviated as LXX. The New Testament itself was written in Koine from the start in all 27 of its Books. Koine was a common language, along with Latin, in the communications amongst the so-called “Church Fathers” during the late and post New Testament period.
The Case for Learning some Basics of Koine
None of the resources presented here will presume any knowledge of Koine. However, let me here make a case for examine such Koine text for additional insights.
- It was the language chosen by God to record the New Testament. This itself is notable. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew. The ‘mother tongue’ of the Jewish people of the New Testament in Israel was Aramaic, with some Hebrew knowledge as well. The ‘mother tongue’ of the Roman people, which would include many from the vast conquered lands of Rome, such that even the Mediterranean Sea was Rome’s inland lake (a big lake) used the Latin language. Finally, there was the Koine language that emerged from ca. 330 B.C. with the rising up and military campaigns of Alexander the Great. One of his legacies was the spreading of the language of Koine Greek across the many nations that he conquered and influenced such that even before the time of the New Testament, Koine had become a “lingua franca,” a broadly used second (or first) language of people. God in His Providential Wisdom, inspired all the writers of the New Testament, who almost to a man, were not Koine speakers and writers as their mother tongue, to write their respective Books of our Bible in Koine. Interestingly, Luke we know was a native Greek, and so Koine was actually his mother tongue and he was used by God to write both the longest Gospel (Luke) as well as the long Book of Acts, together comprising more than one-fourth of the New Testament.
- Those seriously interested in God’s Word as given in the New Testament, and in the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint, abbreviated LXX, dating to about 200 B.C.) have reached for the Koine manuscripts (mss).
- The rediscovery of the Koine mss early in the 16th Century with the publication by Erasmus and then subsequently by Geneva scholars (Beze, et. al), and used to create the very first English translations from the Koine (Tyndale, et. al) were powerful forces inaugurating The Reformation.
- The many Koine language helps available today make it possible, with some effort, for those of us who are not educated in the original language of the New Testament (NT) to gain useful insight, in all the studies given in these pages..
- “Literal,” “word for word” English translations are neither. Yes, we do have God’s Word available to us in English. But no translation is truly “literal” in the sense of a one-to-one mapping of a Koine mss word for an English word. None. Further, “word for word,” when it does occur is a misleading claim. The implication of such claim is that the Koine word had an exact, precise, single meaning–equivalent to some concrete number, like 3141–and there corresponds in English an exact, precise, single word–such that, say, 3141 in Koine, as distinct from every other four-digit number in that language corresponds exactly to, say, 8421 in English. We can do one-for-one with numbers, though the number 3141 in a Greek-using culture is, indeed, 3141 in an English-using culture. But such is not possible with words. There are several reasons for this, as anyone who knows more than one language knows by experience: there are just some words that cannot be fully translated by any one word, or even sometimes by a word phrase, exactly. Each word, unlike a number, has a “semantic range.” In the Koine, a translator has to consider such Koine range of meaning for any given word, and then use his judgment to select an English word most closely aligned with it, although such English word itself will have its own semantic range.
- One factor affecting such translations is the designed educational level of the English reader. For instance, the King James Version (KJV, aka Authorized Version) is considered to require a 12th Grade (17+ years old), namely a high school graduate level education (assuming such a thing exists anymore). For the NASB and NKJV the corresponding numbers are 11th Grade (16+ age) and 7th Grade (12+), respectively. The New Living Translation is at 6th Grade, and The Message and The Living Bible are at 4th Grade levels. (The basis for the figures cited can be found here). It is a wonderful situation that we have English versions that can be read by a wide range of ages and educational levels, especially for those for whom English was not their mother tongue. But if one longs for reading at a level great than a teenie-bopper, one has need to dig into some form of the original Koine text., or rely on the commentaries and teachings of those who have done so, and listen carefully.
- The value placed on smooth reading. The Koine mss was written for a sophisticated reader using sophisticated expression, word morphology, and sentence syntax. It has a coherent, memorable external and intrinsic beauty, much like poetry. (And much of the Bible is in a poetic form, perhaps one-third of it). Translating such beauty within coherence is a further challenge for which there is no perfect answer. The default approach is that the English translation must be “readable” meaning something further than just reading level (discussed above). It has to have a smoothness to it, with definite and indefinite articles in certain word positions, overall word order (defaulting to S-V-O, Subject Verb Object favored by English). And with helping words, such as connectives and prepositions, to express what is understood to be the intention of the Koine. The alternative? For hearing our Father’s Voice, the alternative is to compromise “smoothness,” and its analogue of “easy reading,” and get it before us ‘straight,’ as straight, as parallel as is possible to do, and understand that the rough edges of the expressions are a natural consequence of the inherent imperfect mapping.
- The beauty of the mot juste, the exactly right word. There is a long history of the French term mot juste. It is the realization every writer, and translator, gets all too rarely when one has come upon the exactly right word for the context and purpose of a sentence. Because we take the Bible as literally the expiration (from the literal meaning of the root “expire,” to breathe forth) of God Himself, we can take that each word in the Koine mss was, and is, mot juste in the Voice of God. Our challenge, and one to be taken lightly, is to map such perfect Koine mss word into the mot juste of English, using every linguistic tool available, the wisdom of every Biblical scholar and person of insight, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Translators have of course sought to do this and have done so sufficiently well that we can reliably say we have the Word / Voice of God presented on the page (or screen). But what we see, how we process and understand each such word, even if was a mot juste, does not automatically lead to the best, fully nuanced, meaning in us, especially if the translation has been, in my view, compromised to dumb down to make for easy reading. There’s a difference between Mozart and elevator muzak, which difference is not solely the performance of such music but also in the hearer; it takes a certain sophistication and effort “to hear,” truly, Mozart.
- Vocabulary and expression. The vocabulary of any language is like the tool box (or, kit) of a factory that puts together machines and engines. The vocabulary of the Koine NT mss is quite limited, just over 5,000 words. Though that may seem like a large number, and certainly is if one is seeking to learn each word, it is a very small number compared to English. As noted, English is a crippled language in terms of available infections of its words, heavily relying on word order for convey the meaning expressed by a group of words joined together in a sentence. But, on the other hand, English is incredibly rich as to its enormous vocabulary. Adult English speakers know (typically) more than 20,000 words (or at least an adult use to know such numbers). Many adults know 40,000 words, and some even many more than that. The total English vocabulary, as measured by entries in the standard dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is approximately 200,000 words, and perhaps five times that number when all the derivatives of the dictionary words (called the “head” words, or the “lemmas”). Further, each word has a semantic range of meaning, according to the context. The word “set” is the ‘winner’ in this regard as the OED identifies more than 400 definitions for the lemma / headword “set.” All this richness of vocabulary possibilities is a resource we can deploy to find that mot juste.