JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. Today, Tom Kelby and Jason DeRouchie talk about the biblical languages. Surprisingly, this is a word of encouragement for those of us who don’t know Hebrew or Greek.

TK: Welcome to GearTalk. Tom and Jason here, and I think we have a topic that’s going to be pretty helpful today. I wanted to talk about the Bible and languages and how it’s put together. I think this will be pretty encouraging. Maybe this even fits with how Jason—how you and I met. We met in Hebrew class, didn’t we?

JD: We did. It was a sweet situation. You were in your grad studies. I was your professor. We only had three students in the class, so it was a lot of professor-student time. I enjoyed it, but that meant you had to answer a lot of questions.

TK: I think that if you’re listing your scariest moments in life, that was in my top, at least at that moment, coming into class and thinking I will never, ever, ever learn this thing.

JD: But you did.

TK: So there you go. So I wanted to talk about—I was just thinking about this and thinking about pastors and leaders. Most pastors, leaders, and certainly most believers in the world, though, don’t know Hebrew or Greek and probably don’t need to learn them as well, correct?

JD: I completely agree. Most pastors and teachers in the world don’t need to know the languages, but they need to have resources written by people who do.

TK: OK, explain that.

JD: Well, what I mean is that God gave us his word in a book. And he chose—God’s the one who chose—to give us 75% of that book in Hebrew and 25% of that book in Greek. The Hebrew portion, intriguingly, is the Old Testament that was targeted on the nation of Israel. It significantly includes an unpacking of the old covenant that God gave through Moses at Mount Sinai to one nation in the land—in the promised land. The New Testament is written at a different time in the history of salvation when Christ has come, and God chooses to not use the language of one people but to use the language of all peoples. It would be comparable to English of our day, where God gave them the New Testament written to a multi-ethnic church in the language that all the nations could understand.

And then that church did adopt the Jewish Scriptures, which were Jesus’s only Bible, the Old Testament, written in Hebrew and some minor portions in the language of Aramaic, which is a sister language to Hebrew. But the New Testament was given to us in Greek. We need men and women in every generation who can handle God’s Word in the original languages, who can be authorities in Bible translation and in commentary writing to be able to serve church leaders of every generation. All of us recognize, for example, how different King James English is from twenty-first century English. It just has a different ring, and there’s a poetic beauty to it, but it’s not how we talk today. And it’s so helpful to have Bibles—we have so many exceptional translations in English, and we happen to be—you and I, Tom—growing up in a culture where English was our heart language. And we’re just amazingly privileged.

So many of the people groups that you and I have engaged and worked with, they don’t have a Bible in their heart language, and so they are having to learn English or some other translation in order to embrace the Bible. But we can celebrate that God’s Word works through translation and yet also recognize we need in every generation men and women who can do the frontline effort to make sure the Word of God is faithfully translated. And then as preachers and teachers, we need faithful men and women that we can trust who are working with the text as God gave it to us—people that we can follow and be confident in to ensure that as we are using their resources and even a translation which is filled with interpretation—that’s why we have differences between, say, the New International Version (the NIV) and the English Standard Version (the ESV). Why are there differences if these are godly men and women that we would love and whose books we read today, whose sermons we listen to, who worked on these translations? Why are they different? Well, there’s a number of reasons, and we can have a future podcast to talk about that. But a key is that at points every translation shows differences of interpretation, and so it’s just vital that we have godly men and women who can help us discern, if we don’t know the languages, what God’s Word actually is, and yet also be able to celebrate that we have God’s Word in a language that we can understand. And it truly is God’s Word—my ESV that I have, or my New American Standard, or my NIV is God’s Word insofar as it faithfully represents the original that God gave us in Hebrew or Greek.

TK: So let’s talk mechanics a little bit. When I opened my Old Testament, what language is standing behind what I’m reading? So if I’m reading English, let’s say, where did they get that from? you said Hebrew.

JD: That’s right, most of the Old Testament is written in Hebrew. We have a short clause in Genesis, a short clause in Jeremiah, several verses in Ezra, and then seven chapters in the Book of Daniel that were written in Aramaic. But most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. This is the language that Abraham apparently knew, and some would question that. At the very least, it’s the language that Moses knew and gave us the first five books and the rest of the Old Testament in.

TK: So what am I sometimes—sometimes in our Bible, we’ll see at the bottom, and it’ll say Hebrew and then it might have a comma, a little note, and it’ll say Septuagint, and it’ll give a different option. Can you tell us what the Septuagint is? Or LXX is the abbreviation—what? How is that different from what we’re talking about?

JD: Yes. So the LXX, that’s an abbreviation. It’s Roman numerals for the number 70. And it relates to the tradition that 72 different translators worked through and gave us the books of Moses in Greek. The world that Jesus grew up in—the Jews, they had the standard Bible of the day written in Hebrew, used at the temple, but most people were using scriptures that had been translated already into Aramaic. But the common language that the Romans were using in the streets, that people were using in business and in trade, they were speaking in Greek, and that had been the case since Alexander the Great had conquered the entire known world in the early 300s. He had brought Greek language and Greek culture to the world, and the Greeks controlled all of the ancient world. And so their language became the dominant trade language and the language of international politics, much like English is today.

So God in his kindness—I mean, think about it: you’ve got Israelites who were exiled, who were growing up away from the Holy Land. The kids of the exiles are taking on the culture, and we see this very much today, even in the United States, where we have so many immigrants, and the second-generation immigrants, the children, know English far better than most of their parents, and then even the grandkids may not even know the native language of the grandparents from the land that they came from. It was happening exactly that way in Israel. In fact, in the book of Ezra, we learn that Ezra read the Scriptures, reading a scroll in Hebrew, and then it says that Ezra and the elders of the land interpreted Scripture to the people in the language that they could understand. It’s most likely that they were hearing the word in Hebrew, and then it was being reinterpreted for them in Aramaic, in a language that they could understand.

Greek was the dominant language, and you have exiles who were living in areas even where Aramaic was not spoken and where all they knew was Greek, and then there were scribes who still knew the ancient language of Hebrew. And so these scribes, with great wisdom, in order to preserve God’s Word, translated it into a language that people could understand. And it worked—they were able to hear God’s Word. And the very first translation that we have is the translation from Hebrew into Greek, and we call that the Septuagint.

And so all of Jesus’s Bible, all the Old Testament in Jesus’s day, had been translated into Greek. In fact, many of the Jews were most familiar not with Isaiah in Hebrew, but Isaiah in Greek, and many of the New Testament authors, even when they’re writing their letters or writing their gospel accounts, when they cite scripture—just like you and I when we’re preaching from the pulpit, we’re not speaking, reading Hebrew verses or reading Greek text, we’re reading our ESV open and we read it—the New Testament authors did exactly the same thing. For the people who were in the churches, who themselves had scrolls of their Bible in Greek, they were quoting their scriptures in Greek. It’s more common in the New Testament that they’re citing their Septuagint translations over their Hebrew text rather than making their own translations of the Hebrew on the fly into Greek—they just cite their Greek Bible.

So when we see that down in a footnote that says the Hebrew says this, but we have at this point in the Old Testament translation followed the Greek text or the Septuagint text, that’s what we’re reading—that they believe that Greek translation actually has a more faithful recollection of the original than even the Hebrew copy that we have has.

TK: In that particular half of verse or statement or whatever.

JD: That’s right. That’s right. It’s an important thing to remember, and it’s so tricky because all of this can sound pretty technical, but God gave us his Bible in Hebrew and Greek, but we don’t have the scroll that Isaiah wrote. We have copies of copies of copies of that scroll that Isaiah wrote, and God never promised that the copies—they’re called texts, Hebrew texts of Isaiah—would have no errors in them. God didn’t promise that. He gave us the Word as it came from him through his prophet. That’s what we believe had highest authority without any errors in it. But we don’t have those specific manuscripts. Similarly, with the translations, we don’t have the original translations—we have copies and copies of those translations.

But what’s amazing is that something like the Dead Sea Scrolls comes—1948, great discovery in the Judean wilderness, and even recently, brand new scrolls from the Judean Desert still being found. And the earliest entire Old Testament that we had in Hebrew was dated from AD 1000—specifically was AD 1008 or 1009. That was the earliest complete Old Testament in Hebrew that we had had until 1948. And now here we are some 60 years later, and we have, through the discovery of what’s called the Dead Sea Scrolls, found all these manuscripts that cover all of the Old Testament books except Esther in Hebrew, dated 1000 years earlier, dated all the way to the days of Jesus and a little before. And what’s amazing is that we can see now how the Jews preserve their text.

TK: And what did they learn from that?

JD: Oh, it’s just amazing how similar the Hebrew text from the Dead Sea Scrolls is to the manuscripts that we had that were dated 1000 years later. And in the margin of so many of these manuscripts, you’ll see these little tiny notations. Sometimes they’ll be in Greek or in Latin, most often they’re in Aramaic, and these little notations that will say, “This is the one thousand and fourth verse in this section of the Bible,” or “This word is the exact middle word in the entire book of Isaiah.” So you need to go back and count all the words before this and all the words after it and make sure that it lines up, because if it doesn’t, that means you have a mistake and you need to go back and find it. We’ll see notes that say, “This word looks like it’s spelled funny, but it’s exactly what I had in the manuscript that I was copying, so don’t touch it.”

The Jews were exceptionally careful, and so even though God didn’t promise us that he would preserve his book without errors, what’s amazing is that the errors that we find are so small. Most of them are similar to the kinds of errors we might read if we’re just reading like a Field and Stream magazine, or reading a news article or a blog post online and we see they had a little keystroke error and they replaced the i with the u because they’re side by side on the keyboard, or they have just a tiny spelling error—somebody writes “their” instead of “there”—and there’s nothing in that we might pause and say, “What was that? Oh, this is what he meant,” and we can understand it right away.

So we need to distinguish between what God gave us in his book has no errors, but the works that we’re drawing from can have human mistakes in them. But God in his mercy—what’s been shown over and over and over again—is that God in his mercy has preserved his word in a book in a way that we can, with great confidence, believe. For example, the Hebrew text and the Greek text that scholars are working off of today is almost completely like the original that Jeremiah gave us, or that David wrote in the Psalms, and so that means the basis of our translations is solid, and it allows us then to be very confident that when we open up the Gospel of Mark or open up the book of Esther, that we are getting a very good expression, faithful expression of the Word of God.

TK: That’s really sweet. Jason, what would you say to somebody like—we talked about pastors, leaders, parents, Sunday school teachers, we could go on and on—faithful believers who say, “I want to know God’s Word as well as I can, but this is the only language I know or ever will know.” How can I study as carefully as possible having only one language that I can access, whether it’s English or whatever? So what would you suggest to a student of yours who will never learn Hebrew or Greek?

JD: I would just first say, don’t be discouraged. There is a lifetime of learning. There are so many—just using, learning to read your English Bible well will carry you. My dad has been a faithful preacher and pastor for so much of his life, most of my life, and he never learned Greek and Hebrew, and God has used him in so many ways. He’s had so many discoveries of God’s truth in the book, and he has guided numerous flocks through deep waters with the very Word of God. Morning after morning I do my devotions with my English Bible open—it’s my heart language—and even though I’ve studied Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic, I still read the Bible in English. I teach the Bible in English, and I celebrate that God has given us a number of translations.

So first thing I would say is those who only have English need to learn how to read carefully—to observe carefully, understand rightly, and evaluate fairly what’s before them, to look at the small words, look at the big words, try to understand how all the parts fit together, learn to read carefully for yourself.

TK: That’s really helpful. And you’re saying in English though, learn it the way English works.

JD: Yep, read it in English. Second, those that don’t have the biblical languages need to familiarize themselves—I think you’ll serve yourself a lot if you familiarize yourself with the passage that you’re preaching, how is it worded in other translations, and especially—and we’ve never talked about this yet in our podcast—translations that were shaped under different translation theory. There are basically three different kinds of translations: there are very wooden form-based translations, there are what people call sense-driven translations (like get the sense of it, but you don’t have to worry about keeping up with all the grammar, just know what he was trying to say in the one language and then capture it as best as you can in English), and then there’s paraphrases.

Translations like the New American Standard and the ESV are much more form-based. The New International Version, the NIV, and the Christian Standard Bible or the New Living Translation—they’re more sense-based. And then a paraphrase would be something like the old Living Bible or The Message—they’re just paraphrases even to the point where The Message can’t put verse references in, it can only have paragraph markings, because they have just totally separated themselves from attempting to preserve anything about any correspondence of language.

But having, for example, an NIV or a Christian Standard Bible or a New Living Translation on the one hand, having that open and then having an ESV and New American Standard open, it can be really helpful to compare the translations. If you don’t know the languages, compare the translations and say, “Are they saying the same thing?” Just reading it in two different translations could signal for you, “Oh, there’s an interpretive issue here because the NIV is really taking this in a different direction than the ESV.” And what that would do is simply signal to you, “I think I’m going to pull a commentary off the shelf and see what those who are wrestling with the Hebrew and Greek are actually saying.” And you can find some really great commentaries who’ve been written by faithful people that won’t bog you down in all the technical jargon. So that leads me to the third issue of encouragement.

TK: And just backing up though, for one second, you weren’t saying one of the options like the more sense-driven or the more—what was the word—form-driven, you weren’t saying one was the right one. You were saying you want to be discerning from both of those ways of looking at the text.

JD: That’s exactly right.

TK: So you’re not saying this is the best translation here.

JD: Yeah, I’m not saying that. I can see benefit, for example, of someone who has never really learned how to study super well and never been taught to think very much, and yet they’re wanting to—they’re wanting to learn and they’re wanting to guide people. I can see benefit for someone like that to use a more sense-driven translation where you’re relying on scholars that are worth trusting to do more interpretive work for you, to help you better hear in contemporary English what they believe the passage means. And so for my dad, for example, he has always used the New International Version for his teaching and preaching, and he’s relying on people like Don Carson and Doug Moo, who have been such faithful conservative evangelical scholars who led in the translation of the NIV. And I just celebrate that my dad’s able to follow godly men who have helped him.

But what would be misguided is to act as though interpretation hasn’t happened, and so a translation that is more like the ESV or even more to the point, the New American Standard that’s more attempting word-for-word equivalents and to capture not only grammar but to retain historical connections—translations like that do require more of the interpreter because it’s leaving more questions unanswered because it’s not helping as much with the interpretation in building a sense-driven translation. Instead, it’s kind of laying out, “Here’s what it says,” and you’ve got to make more decisions as an interpreter.

And most English-only folks are—I say most—many who have been blessed with the opportunity to have some either sit under other preachers who have been trained well or are in cultures that have good resources like good study Bibles and good commentaries, they’re in a position where they can learn to use a more form-based translation—ESV, New American Standard—with great effect, because they’re able to make comparisons and wrestle and then be able to go to commentaries and not only read them and say, “Oh, Don Carson says this,” or “Greg Beale says this,” or “Douglas Stewart says this.” Instead, they’re able to say, “This is what they said. Now, does that fit the text well?” And they’re not only being second-handers in the sense of listening to what someone else says and taking it and assuming it’s right. Instead, they’re able to evaluate because they’re offering good critical thinking—not critical in the sense of negative but critical in the sense of they’re really evaluating arguments up against what they’re seeing in their English text. And the best interpreters are those who get to that point, but it doesn’t come easily, and it takes time to be able to have enough of an understanding of scripture to be able to not only follow but evaluate what others are saying.

The last thing I would just want to say is for those who are English Bible only—celebrate that God has raised up in this generation men and women who can handle the Bible in a way that lets you and me have an English text that is faithfully grounded and clear to understand. We live in a culture where we can buy great commentaries that are useful and can give us insights that we might have missed on our own. And to be aware of that and to try to help our people celebrate it, to be able to help our people recognize the efforts that have gone behind helping us have a Bible in a language that we can understand and have tools that are worth using. Reflections, Tom?

TK: I love it. I think it makes me just really thankful that God has put it on people’s hearts in every generation to be producing tools for his people so we can know his word and use it. And it makes me think also you can know any language in the world, every language, but it doesn’t mean that you know God and you know what he said. So there’s not a thought of having—because you know a certain language or whatever—that would be the key to the text. I think ultimately our heart is a massive key to the text; here is a heart postured toward God. And having these tools like you said, like a couple translations in front of me and access to—let’s say I’m working through the book of John or something—to say I’m going to text or call a friend of mine, say, “What’s a commentary that you’ve used that’s been helpful to you on the book of John?” A faithful one or something like that. But with those tools in front of you, I think you will serve your people really well and you will know the heart of a text.

JD: I think that if you meet someone that you can trust, or you find out from them who should I be reading, who should I be listening to—because defending truth for our people is imperative. And even if you’re in a rural church, it’s very possible that at some time in your ministry someone will show up and they’ll start attending. They’ll join your Sunday school class and they’ll say, “Well, the Greek or the Hebrew says this.” And if you don’t know the Greek and the Hebrew, all of a sudden it can seem like, “Well, I’ve just been trumped. I don’t know what to do,” and they might be proclaiming something that’s false and yet you’re the one, as a minister of God’s Word—if you’re the elder in the church or you’re the pastor, you’re the guardian of this flock. And so you need to be aware what to do.

Now I remember, Tom, you and I were at a breakfast one day and listening to a brother give a devotional. He was just challenging pastors to have humility. Just listening to him humbled me. But he was talking about the tools in his toolbox and how he had to get to a point to recognize as a preacher that he needed to use tools. And that sometimes those tools were people, and he needed to have the humility to ask for help, and he was celebrating that God had given him certain tools, namely certain individuals in his toolbox, that he could connect to. And this was an elderly pastor who’s been faithful to the Lord for years and years. Yet he was humbly calling upon a room filled with many younger men to have a humility that’s willing to say, “I need some help.” And it was so good. But we want to make sure we’ve got the right help and that we ourselves know where to go. And even our ministry at Hands to Plow—that’s part of our goal is to put resources into the hands of people all around the world that can serve them in understanding God’s Word in their heart language to understand how to make the connections. And I pray that God can help us be one of those faithful resources to the majority of ministers across our globe.

TK: Agreed. Agreed. I am thinking one of the reasons we’re actually doing this podcast, not this particular episode, but as a whole, is the number of times I’ve called you on the phone and said, “Jason, I’m reading this, I’m thinking this. I’d just like to talk to you a little bit about what you’re thinking as you read this passage.” So having a faithful brother that you can call and talk to—brother or sister that you can call, talk about things. And so that happened enough times. One of my thoughts was, “Boy, I feel like this would be a blessing for other people to at least overhear some of these conversations of guys talking about God’s Word together.”

JD: And you’ve been that type of faithful brother to so many others, and both of us have testimonies of those that we have taught who’ve now been able to serve others in that way where they’ve been able to grow and they are being faithful men and women of the Word. And that’s such a joy to be able to train men who will be able to train others also.

TK: And so that was one of the goals today is thinking we know so many people who what they know is the English text and it might seem confusing. Like “OK, what? Where’s the Greek? Where’s the Hebrew? Where’s the whatever?” And if you would feel a lack somehow like “if only I knew these things, like I’m missing”—and our encouragement to you is: read the Word you’ve been given. If for some reason the Lord is saying you need to do this, learn the languages, then do it, but otherwise we’ve been given great tools, so lean into them, do the hard work, but there’s plenty there to keep us busy in our own heart languages.

JD: That’s right. A useful resource—it’s not perfect, but it’s put together it appears by a group of evangelicals—bestcommentaries.com can be a useful resource in just getting a first taste of where should I look at potential resources if I’m gearing up to preach a book. But you also have to know that there’s different types of commentaries and one of the benefits is that on this resource, it actually tells you is this commentary a pastoral commentary? Is it an evangelical commentary? Is this a technical commentary? So you can assess where you’re at in your own development and what type of resource might best serve you.

TK: That’s really good, Jason. When you’re preaching to people, how often do you refer to Hebrew words or Greek words?

JD: Very rarely, almost never. But I mean for myself, I’m always doing the homework behind the scenes, but it’s very rare that I ever say “the Hebrew says” or “the Greek says.” Though I’m doing that kind of wrestling in order to guide my people, but I want to be able to show my people what it says in English. My goal is not to lift myself up as the authority where you need me in order to understand the book. Rather my responsibility as the preacher is to point them to the word and to increasingly develop within them skill.

TK: That’s really good. That’s really good. May we be faithful men and women reading, loving, handling, preaching God’s Word.

JD: Amen. Well, our time’s up, Tom, so.

TK: Alright.

JD: Bye friends.

JY: Thanks for joining us for GearTalk. If you have questions about biblical theology you’d like us to address on future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Also check out handstoplow.org for resources designed to help you understand the Bible and its teachings.