Why is it said that knowing Biblical Greek or Hebrew helps with Scripture

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What does knowing Biblical Greek or Hebrew help with in regards to Scripture? What does it help with exactly? What sorts of things would knowing Biblical Greek or Hebrew do for a Scholar of the Bible in helping them better understand things?

I believe that at least the Hebrew does something spiritually that other languages don’t allow. It just is a different spiritual experience and connection to the Scriptures with Hebrew. But I’m also interested in Greek. I’d like to know how Greek compares to Hebrew too.
 
I’ve taken both as well as Latin, and for me it has helped in numerous ways. One way is that i can usually tell when someone is full of it if they try to say it means this or that in the Greek or Hebrew and when its obvious to me that they dont know anything about the languages, but for someone who is not familar with those languages might not catch on. It also helps me when I am reading expositions on Scripture and those who refer to the Greek and Hebrew I can follow along without feeling lost.

One thing that I have noticed is so many people try to “prove” a doctrine or argument by using the Greek or Hebrew, and it has become such a mess that it reminds me of all the interpretations in Protesantism because people are coming up with just as many wrong interpretations even with the Greek and Hebrew texts. My feeling is that the languages can truly aid Bible study but it does not unlock anything new that the Church has already known for 2000 years.
 
But how does it help you actually engage the Scripture itself better?
Does it? And if so in what ways?
 
I know some latin, a little greek, but even less hebrew. However, alongside the knowing what a word or sentence means is knowing the cultural setting of that word / sentence. For this it is a matter of reading wide and broad, to get a concensus of thought, rather than the opinion of merely one or two.

Protestanism understands the hebrew and greek of John’s gospel, but refuses to accept the culture of the language, and therefore, for example, cannot accept the Body & Blood revelation of chapter 6.

Whereas the understanding of the Church goes back to the culture of that moment.
 
I can’t answer your actual question, but I can provide maybe a pointer.

I know Spanish fairly well. As anyone knows who has studied a foreign language, the easiest part is usually reading (as opposed to writing, speaking, or listening). So I can read Spanish at a fairly high level.

When I’m reading something that has been (well) translated from Spanish, I get a better idea of the sense of the original than if I’m reading something translated from a language I don’t know. And if there is some part that doesn’t ring true, I can look it up in the original and understand it better.

I think it would be the same thing with Hebrew and Greek, but I’m too lazy to learn a language with a different alphabet. 🙂

–Jen
 
Personally for me, it hasn’t done anything miraculous when it come to interpreting Scripture, but it has aided my studies. It allows me to verify other translations of Scripture, but it has not helped me to interpret Scripture any better. Which over time I’ve noticed a lot of Bible translators who add footnotes to Bibles are not the best interpreters of Scripture. The gift of learning languages does not mean its a gift of interpreting the meaning. St. Jerome had a knack of both, but he was not quite the interpreter as Augustine or Chrysostom or Aquinas, but he excelled in the languages.
 
One word can be translated in many ways. If you know the original word, you can get deeper into it.

For example, “Blessed are the poor.”

Blessed in Greek is markarios. But *markarios *can also mean *happy *or envied. So when you read Fr. Dubay’s “Happy Are You Poor,” you’ll understand why he used “happy.”
This can even be done in a similar manner in English by getting out your dictionary and diving deeper into words. Fear of the Lord can also be understood as Revere the Lord. Look up *fear *in your dictionary, and you’ll see that it can be understood as revere, especially when referring to God.
 
Thanks. It seems I don’t really need to study a different language for the purpose of understanding Scripture. I think Church writings should help fine in English.

But I might study a language or a few for enrichment in general. I don’t know what I would actually need it for though.
 
Well I believe the Church and good commentary would provide the different meanings or translations and explain things more than adequately.
 
One thing about learning a Biblical language is that you probably wont regret it after you study it. I also like what someone said above about once you know a language pretty good it helps you to understand the sense of the original of what has been translated.
 
TreeOfLife123 said:
Well I believe the Church and good commentary would provide the different meanings or translations and explain things more than adequately.
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I think learning the original is for people who don’t trust their Church leaders.

If you trust the scholars who write those commentaries and you believe they are being objective and not seeing things through glasses tinted by their particular denomination… then no need to learn the original language!

If, however, you have concerns about the commentator - is he seeing things from a limited viewpoint? Is everything colored by his preconceived ideas - then you might want to seek to learn the original languages so you can weigh what is said with what can be known through intensive study.

I, for one, trust my Catholic apologists and the Catechism. I don’t need anymore then that. 😃
 
Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.

Do you need to be able to interpret Greek and Latin to know that this is all you need?
 
rdscheirer said:
Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.

Do you need to be able to interpret Greek and Latin to know that this is all you need?
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It’s really not.

What about same sex marriage? Shouldn’t it be okay? After all, they’re just loving each other and some of them love God! So why shouldn’t it be allowed?

What about abortion? Sure it’s murder BUT what if the mother is going to die? Isn’t it more loving to save her life then let the unborn child have a chance for life?

Love God and love your neighbor doesn’t really cover ALL moral issues.
 
If I might chime in with a different perspective, sometimes we get so caught up in extracting teachings out of the Bible that we forget that part of what God inspired is a literary element as well. I’d say that a lot of Christians might feel that it’s an insult to Scripture to “bring it down” to a literary level — but who ever said art was useless? Surely not a Catholic teaching! Sacramentalism, blah blah blah. So, anyways, sometimes – as we all instinctively know – the meaning is carried in the form and style of a text. Is “Why did you have to be born Romeo? Please deny your family name in order to be with me” as meaningful as “Romeo, O Romeo — wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name!” So, for example, you’ll find that when Paul speaks of divisions in the Body of Christ in his first letter to the Corinthians, in the Greek and in literary feature-conscious translations the exhortation is couched in the political rhetoric of the day — “I’m for Paul! I’m for Apollos!” and so on. Or did you know that the OT is loaded with puns? Or that Eve actually cuts Satan off mid-sentence at the tree? Or that Psalm 18 actually portrays the Lord in a similar fashion to a pagan God (riding on a cherub), even hijacking one of his titles — a title which would read as archaic in the original? All these little things add up to a greater understanding of what God’s trying to say in the books. Without some grasp of these literary features you can’t be completely sure what’s intended to be conveyed. It’s like trying to discern someone’s tone of voice from an internet post that’s also been translated.

Now, if you want a translation of the Bible’s books that takes these into consideration, try either Robert Alter’s OT translations or Richmond Lattimore’s NT.
 
TreeOfLife123 said:
But how does it help you actually engage the Scripture itself better?
Does it? And if so in what ways?
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Well for one the Scriptures are written in those languages. 😉 Reading the original text is really a different, richer experience than reading a translation, since after all some things do get ‘lost in translation’. It is a truism that words in a given language have multiple nuances and shades of meaning that could not be reproduced exactly in another tongue. I mean, it’s like reading Victor Hugo in French, or (for a non-English speaker) reading Shakespeare in English. Sure there are a lot of fine translations of Hugo’s or Shakespeare’s works, but ultimately no translation is perfect. And fact is some translations could even be less than adequate.
 
TreeOfLife123 said:
Well I believe the Church and good commentary would provide the different meanings or translations and explain things more than adequately.
Click to expand...
As someone who have read quite a number of commentaries, I will say this: no two commentaries (including Catholic ones) are the same. Let’s face it, Scripture is highly ambiguous and difficult to understand (and no, that’s not a bad thing), in fact it allows for different understandings and interpretations of the text. As in translations, most commentaries I’ve encountered ultimately succeed only in giving out one or two ways of reading it. The interpretation given in one commentary could either be supported and refuted by another - and I’m not even talking about matters of doctrine! 😉

So while translations and various study aids are helpful, they must not be seen as an end unto themselves.
 
rdscheirer said:
Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.

Do you need to be able to interpret Greek and Latin to know that this is all you need?
Click to expand...
Well, it’s not going to help you defend your faith against Protestant attacks.

Does the English “love” really fully convey the nature of relationship demanded by these commandments? What does “to love God” mean here?

Or how about Jesus’ verb for “eat” in John 6:54 as compared with “eat” in the preceding verses?

Or how about the word order in John 1:1?

Something is always lost in translation but if you look at the original Greek of the New Testament you will see how much more the Scripture actually says in the examples given. So yes, to know the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New will actually enhance your understanding of Scripture as compared with translations alone.
 
Thank you for that Patrick.
So I don’t know what to do now.
If the translations vary so much how does one learn of the real interpretations of the Bible?
I mean if interpretations vary so much how does one learn of the real interpretation?
 
I’ll add that often there are repeated uses of a given word in Hebrew and/or Greek in those texts that don’t show up in English translations. When those words aren’t repeated the same way in English, sometimes meaning is lost, like so:

platytera.blogspot.com/2011/12/murmuring-grumblers.html

Additionally, in Bibles such as the NIV, sometimes a word is translated right out of the text; without being able to check the Greek or Hebrew, you won’t know what’s been lost. For example, Catholics know the word bishop, which the KJV uses 6 times. But in the NIV, it’s not used at all. Checking the Greek shows the KJV was translating ἐπίσκοπος, episkopos, bishop. But without knowing that, a Catholic could read the NIV and think: “My Protestant friend was right: there is no mention of bishops in the Bible!”
 
Thank you kkollwitz,

What you say has me thinking that I should learn Hebrew and Greek as a means of help with the study of the Bible.
 
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