Word Studies
I would highly recommend that any Bible student own a copy of Strong's Concordance. This invaluable tool allows the user to locate every verse in the Bible which uses a particular English word. This is especially helpful if one is trying to locate a verse but can't recall where in the Bible it is located. If the user can remember a word or two from the verse, then the Strong's Concordance will help that person narrow down his or her search.
Another great tool is Young's Analytical Concordance. Strong's Concordance will list every occurance of a particular English word in the Bible. However, maybe not all of those occurances were translated from the same Hebrew or Greek word. This is important information to research when we are doing word studies.
For example, the word "fame" is found 16 times in the King James Version of the Old Testament. However, not all of those occurances were translated from the same Hebrew word. In fact, five different Hebrew words are responsible for those 16 occurances. Even though all of those words appear to be the same in our English Bible, that was not the case when God wrote the Bible.
The Hebrew word the translators got "fame" from in First Kings 10:7 is shemuah. If we are doing a word study, then what we should really look for are all the occurances of this Hebrew word. Young's Analytical Concordance will list these for us as follows:
The words in the list above are all the different English words shemuah has been translated into in our King James Bible, accompanied by the number of times each English word was used in translating shemuah. What this means is that if we were reading the original Hebrew manuscript we would find that God used the word shemuah 26 times in the Old Testament. Twice the King James translators translated it as "fame," but, as you can see, they also used six other English words when translating shemuah. We can look up these six English words in our concordance and discover in which verses shemuah is located. Then, when reading those verses we can understand them as all using the same word, even though in English they are different.
Another type of word study is one in which the student is searching for the spiritual meaning of a word. Very often God uses words in ways we don't. The Bible is its own dictionary. Sometimes the spiritual meaning of a word is clearly given to us such as is the case when Jesus said that He is the Bread of Life. Other times we have to study a little more carefully to learn the spiritual meaning (for example, "ship" can signify the church). In either case, this information is necessary in order to understand the spiritual teachings God has placed in the Bible. For example, we read that Goliath was dealt a devestating blow with a stone. As we study the word "stone" we discover that it represents Christ. Goliath represented Satan and it is Christ who deals the devestating blow to Satan.
