Greek vs Hebrew: A History of the Biblical Languages and Lexicography

How much of the Bible is lost in translation? Why are the older forms of English, Hebrew and Greek referred to as ‘dead languages,’ even though modern versions are spoken today? Can we really unlock the deeper meaning of ancient texts using modern dictionaries? And when translations differ, what tools can we use to reliably interpret the original language?

Strap yourselves in for a deep dive into the history of the Biblical languages, exploring the development of English, Hebrew and Greek, revealing how we can reliably interpret so-called “dead” languages in the 21st century. And don’t worry. We’ll be breaking down these topics for people who don’t know any Greek or Hebrew. So, let’s dive in.

Introduction

Welcome back to Cross Bible! If you haven’t seen our previous videos featuring our Timeline of the Bible feature, you may want to go back and watch them to learn about the origin of modern Bibles. The transcripts for all of our videos are available on our blog page, in case you prefer reading this material. We haven’t released a video in quite some time, because our team has been laser-focused on releasing the beta version of our new Bible reader feature, which you can now use for free on CrossBible.com.

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Part I - A History of English

Early English Bible Translations

As we examine how languages change over time, we’ll discuss how language change affects Bible translations. Our survey of the Biblical languages will focus specifically on the tradition of “lexicography,” the discipline of recording word meanings in a “lexicon,” which is just a fancy Greek term for “dictionary” applied to languages like Greek and Hebrew.

The right-hand section of our Timeline of the Bible feature reveals a huge number of Bibles published recently in the English language. And we can trace the history of English Bible translations all the way back to the Lindisfarne Gospels in the 8th century. This was actually a so-called “gloss,” meaning that it simply mapped Old English words onto the Latin text of the Vulgate Bible. The first prose translation of the Bible in Old English was the Wessex Gospels, produced in the 10th century. For Modern English speakers, these texts are completely unintelligible without special training.

By the time we reach the printing revolution of the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation sparked a movement to translate the Bible into informal, vernacular languages that common people could understand. The key Bibles from this period include the Tyndale Bible, the Geneva Bible, The Great Bible, Taverner’s Bible and the Bishops’ Bible. These were all forerunners to the most influential English Bible translation of all time - The Authorized Version, more commonly known as the King James Bible.

This translation and its underlying Greek text loomed large over the 19th century. But in the 20th century, the English Revised Version began to popularize the emerging Critical Text of the New Testament, overthrowing the so-called Textus Receptus in academia and in modern Bible translations. If you want to learn more about that whole process, you can go back and watch our previous videos.

Modern English Bible Translations

The 20th century gave us a nuclear explosion in English Bible translations that are updated and revised based on advancements in the field of Biblical studies. The continual discovery of more and more ancient manuscripts inspired updates to the underlying biblical text in the original languages.

The 19th-century English Revised Version gave rise to the 20th-century American Standard Version, which then spawned a dizzying variety of Bibles that use different translation methods and target different reading levels. They are commonly referred to by a variety of acronyms: the Revised Standard Version (RSV), The Living Bible (TLB) and The New American Standard Bible (NASB). More recent offshoots of the RSV include the New Living Translation (NLT), the English Standard Version (ESV), the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the New International Version (NIV), and the Jewish Publication Society’s 1917 translation of the Hebrew Masoretic Text, the “old” JPS Tanakh.

Even though the language of the King James Bible remains familiar to many, it’s considered somewhat antiquated for modern audiences who struggle to understand parts of it without special training. One of the challenges we face when trying to interpret older English texts is the simple fact that words change their meaning over time, and become what linguists refer to as “false friends”. This phenomenon is common in all languages. So, it’s an important concept to cover with a few brief examples, which we can illustrate in Cross Bible’s new Bible reader feature, which is now live in beta.

False Friends

Cross Bible currently offers about 20 public domain Bibles, with many more in the pipeline. And we currently offer the largest collection of Greek Bibles on the internet. The 1611 King James Bible is the default for now. Let’s select 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 and keep the 1611 King James Bible as the default. In verse 15 we see the phrase “shall not preuent them which are asleepe,” featuring some archaic spelling in this version. Now let’s add a version for comparison, which defaults to Beza’s Greek New Testament, where we see that φθάσωμεν, from the verb φθάνω, is translated as “prevent”. We can flip to horizontal orientation to make them easier to compare. And we can add another Bible to this page, which defaults to a recent translation completed in 2020 called the Berean Standard Bible. Here we see the word “precede” in this context, which is what the verb “prevent” used to mean. So, “prevent” in the King James Bible is what we call a “false friend,” a deceptively familiar word with a different meaning.

Let’s take another example from Philippians chapter 1, verse 27. The King James translates the Greek πολιτεύεσθε as “conversation,” even though the Greek verb πολιτεύομαι actually refers to what we call “behavior,” translated here as “conduct yourselves”. A modern reader of the King James Bible is likely to misinterpret the false friend “conversation” as referring to some kind of “dialogue,” which would be incorrect. There’s nothing wrong with the translation. It’s simply out of date.

Sometimes, words even shift to the opposite meaning. We can observe an example of this in 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, verse 7. Here the King James Bible uses the word “let” to translate the Greek κατέχων, from the verb κατέχω, which actually means “restrain,” which is what we find in modern translations. These false friends and the confusion they cause are natural byproducts of language change over time.

In some instances, well-known Bible passages keeps obsolete language on life support, as in the famous saying in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 19, verse 14 - “suffer little children,” which translates the Greek ἄφετε τὰ παιδία. Many people are aware of the fact that “suffer” used to mean “permit,” translated here as “let the little children”. We may learn what these old-fashioned words mean in Bible translations. But we simply don’t talk like that anymore.

In future videos we’ll dive even deeper into specific Bible translations. But for now, let’s explore the history of English, Hebrew and Greek, and discuss how these languages changed over time, and how this affects our understanding of these languages, which is the core domain of lexicography.

Early English

Having reviewed key examples of how languages become increasingly foreign to later speakers of the same language, it should be clear why translations require periodic updating over time. English is a relatively new language on the world stage. When the Romans first invaded Britain, the island was occupied by people who spoke Celtic languages. At that time English as we know it didn’t even exist yet. The famous invasion of Britain by Germanic tribes, including the Angles and the Saxons, marked the end of Roman rule, and established a new homeland for the language that developed into what we now call Anglo-Saxon or “Old English”. These Germanic people left their mark in the form of runic letters, inscribed on artifacts dating back to the 5th century BC. Those runes served as the original English alphabet.

Between the 8th and 10th centuries, while the northern coast of Britain was being taken over by Vikings who spoke Old Norse, we get Old English texts, written in the newly-adopted Latin alphabet, like the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Wessex Gospels and the epic poem Beowulf. And after the Norman Conquest established Norman French as the prestige language in England, a more recognizable form of English emerged that we call Middle English. During this period English grammar was drastically simplified.

The old-fashioned language of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Wycliffe is assigned to this category, since it’s not comprehensible enough to be considered Modern English. By the time of Tyndale’s translation, centuries after Wycliffe, we already have a much more recognizable form of the language, which we call Early Modern English. This includes categories like “Elizabethan” English, used by Shakespeare and Milton, and the “Jacobian English” of The King James Bible.

The invention of the printing press paved the way for the extensive archival of literary sources for various dialects of Middle English and, to a lesser extent, Old English. The printing press also cemented odd spellings that were taking shape in the Early Modern English period, influenced by sweeping pronunciation changes between the 15th and 17th centuries called the “Great Vowel Shift”. Believe it or not, before the vowel shift, words like “bite” used to be pronounced like “beet” and “beet” used to be pronounced like “beht”.

And it’s in this period of rapid language change when the first English dictionaries emerge, starting with Geoffrey the Grammarian’s English-Latin dictionary. Eventually, monolingual English dictionaries hit the printing press. And the discipline of English lexicography made a giant leap forward with Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary of the English Language, listing both contemporary and archaic words. Eventually we get resources like Webster’s American English Dictionary, documenting the distinct American variety of English. Authors writing in Modern English, like Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens were able to use contemporary language mixed with old-fashioned literary English, fossilized by the legacy of The King James Bible and archived in English dictionaries.

Modern English Lexicography

Today, we have vast collections of words in online databases, like the Middle English Dictionary and the Dictionary of Old English. The dictionary of Old English Corpus consists of over 3,000 texts containing over 3,000,000 words. And the Oxford English Dictionary has amassed a huge collection of lexical entries between its first edition in 1928 and its second edition in 1989, expanding to over half a million entries. English’s historical tendency of borrowing so-called “loan words” from other languages gave English a hybrid vocabulary, where the core words came from the Germanic stock of Old English, while literary vocabulary came from Latin and French. Among the 24,000 words attested in Old English manuscripts, it’s estimated that only 15% are still used today.

One of the core motivations behind producing monolingual dictionaries is to help people understand rare and difficult words, such as technical jargon. Dictionaries preserve archaic vocabulary by archiving meanings that have shifted or become obselete. A diagram by the Oxford English Dictionary’s first editor, James Murray, illustrates the types of words collected, including literary vocabulary like scientific and foreign terms, along with colloquialisms, like technical terminology, slang and regional dialects. This means that, even though we can fill the dictionary with hundreds of thousands of words, those words are merely a sample of what lexicographers have managed to archive. Most educated native speakers of modern languages require a dictionary to understand rare and defunct terms that no longer have currency in the living language. This makes it rather useless to measure the supposed vocabulary size of a language according to the number of words in a dictionary.

Words, tokens and lemmas

When discussing vocabulary words, there’s one issue we need to dispense with when it comes to terminology. Let’s establish what we mean by the word “word” in the context of lexicography. When we discuss a corpus of texts with millions of “words,” we are referring specifically to a concept called “tokens”. Take the following sentence as an example:

“The girls like the boy. But the boy’s friend only likes one girl.”

We could say, putting it simply, that the first sentence has 5 words and the second sentence has 8 words. But since some of the words here are repetitive, we can be more specific by referring to the total number of words, using the term “tokens”. There are a total of 13 tokens in this example. When comparing the sizes of different books, a thick book usually has more tokens than a thin book. Here we’re simply referring to groups of letters separated by spaces and punctuation.

However, there’s another key concept that’s particularly important for inflected languages like Greek. If we were talking about the unique words in a book, those might be described as “lexical items,” which make up individual entries in the dictionary. And each lexical item consists of a head word listed in alphabetical order. This is called a “lemma,” or λήμμα in Greek. So, when we count the unique lemmas (or λήμματα) within a text, duplicates don’t count. Going back to our example:

“The girls like the boy. But the boy’s friend only likes one girl.”

The definite article “the” is counted as three different tokens but only a single lemma. The singular noun “girl” and the plural “girls” are two different tokens, but only one lemma. Verb conjugations such as “like” and “likes” are different tokens, but belong to the same lemma in the dictionary. The noun “boy” and the possessive “boy’s” (with an apostrophe) are different tokens, but the same lemma. The conjunction “but” is only one token and one lemma. The same applies to the adverb “only”. And the number “one” is a single lemma.

So, in this basic example, it helps to differentiate between the total number of tokens, which is 13, and the total number of lemmas, which is only 7. A text will typically have many more tokens than lemmas, especially in an inflected language, where each lemma has many different grammatical forms. So, if you hear that the Shakespearean corpus has nearly one million “words” in it, that refers to the total number of “tokens” in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Whereas “A Shakespeare Glossary” or “Shakespeare Lexicon” may contain only a few thousand unique lemmas, focusing on vocabulary that modern readers find difficult.

Part II - A History of Hebrew

Hebrew Periodization

Having surveyed the relatively short history of the English language, which is extremely well-attested, let’s contrast that against the development of the Biblical languages. This will give us some perspective on the challenges involved in interpreting and translating ancient languages. To trace the development of Ancient Hebrew from inception, we have to go all the way back to the early Iron Age, sometime around the beginning of the so-called “Monarchic Period” or “First Temple Period” of ancient Israel. This was long before Germanic languages in Northern Europe were even a blip on the historical radar.

The proposed periodization of the Hebrew language presented here is based largely on the book Revivalistics by Dr. Ghil’ad Zuckermann, to whom I am very grateful for helping me with this section of the essay. I also rely on the work of other specialists in Semitic languages, such as an article by Dr. Edward Ullendorff called “Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?”, and a book by Dr. Robert Rozetko and Dr. Ian Young, called, “Historical Linguistics & Biblical Hebrew”. I’ll provide links to these works below. Dr. Zuckermann’s periodization of Hebrew is one of several models, where the boundaries and labels for each period may differ. Feel free to leave any constructive criticism below if any corrections or clarifications are required.

Ancient Hebrew

The oldest identifiable Hebrew inscriptions date to the earliest period of Biblical Hebrew, also known as Classical Hebrew, beginning around the 10th century BC. Dr. Zuckerman labels this period “Archaic Biblical Hebrew”. There is some disagreement regarding whether the earliest inscriptions should be classified as “Canaanite,” or specifically as “Hebrew,” since Hebrew emerged around this time as a distinct language from the Canaanite language family. But later inscriptions between the 8th and 6th centuries BC are more easily identifiable as Hebrew, corresponding to archaic language found in parts of the Hebrew Bible like the Pentateuch and the Early Prophets.

The next period is “Standard Biblical Hebrew,” as exemplified in the prose that is commonly dated before the Babylonian Exile of the 6th century BC. This is when Aramaic became the common language of the region, and the Paleo-Hebrew Script began to be replaced by the Aramaic “square” script that’s used to this day. Inscriptions from this period are of particular interest to Semiticists, since they preserve unique Hebrew features. Even though these inscriptions themselves are not biblical texts, the form of the language they are written in is generally classified as Biblical Hebrew or Classical Hebrew.

By the time we get to the first few centuries of the modern era, we reach the Late Biblical Hebrew period, reflected in the book of Chronicles and in later books of the Hebrew Bible commonly dated after the Babylonian Exile. Dr. Zuckermann points out that, according to so-called ‘minimalist’ views, “all the Hebrew Bible books were written at the same time, for example, in the 5th century B.C”. We are not delving into this disputed topic here.

When we reach the Hellenistic period, Greek is the lingua franca in the Jewish diaspora. It’s here, around the 3rd century BC, that we end up with the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint. The Roman period that followed marks the end of spoken Biblical Hebrew, and the language enters into its Mishnaic stage. By the end of the 2nd century A.D. Biblical Hebrew likely became completely dormant, which is a euphemism for the term linguists often use to describe a so-called “dead language,” meaning that it ceased to be spoken as the native language of a community. In the case of Hebrew, it went into “hibernation” when it was reserved exclusively for liturgical use. Dr. Zuckermann postulates that the anticipated death of Hebrew in the 2nd century AD likely motivated the composition of the Mishnah in Hebrew for posterity. After that Rabbis managed to keep Hebrew on life support as a scholarly language that was not spoken as anyone’s native tongue for over 1,700 years.

The Mishnaic Hebrew period ends around the fall of Byzantium, where Dr. Zuckermann delineates a period of Medieval Hebrew(s), in the plural, referring to multiple varieties of literary Hebrew written during the Middle Ages. This was the period when the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible was produced, along with Rabinnic literature and other writings. Beginning in the 10th century, we get the very first lexicons of the Hebrew language. And again in the 15th century, following the very first printed Bibles, Hebrew lexicons that had been in circulation for centuries began to be printed.

Modern Hebrew

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, during the European Jewish Enlightenment called Haskalah, Hebrew was partially revived as a literary language, but not yet as a living spoken language. And here the period called “Maskilic Hebrew” is delineated as a precursor to the full-blown revival of what Dr. Zuckermann calls “Israeli” to distinguish this new language from other forms of so-called “Modern Hebrew”. His designation of the “Israeli” language sets it apart from previous varieties of the “dormant” language that had been hibernating since the 2nd century AD.

In the 1880s, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda became the first person in nearly two thousand years to rear a child exclusively in a revived version of the Hebrew language, the foundation of modern “Israeli”. Ben-Yehuda was capable of reconstructing Hebrew academically, even though it was not his native language. His children, on the other hand, Itamar Ben-Avi and Dola Wittmann, were the first people to acquire Israeli as their native language. Dr. Zuckermann argues that the underlying grammar of the modern language is actually more European than many would like to admit. This is because the original group of Hebrew revivalists were Yiddish speakers, who were unable to fully discard their native European grammar and linguistic mindset, preventing them from reconstructing Hebrew on a purely Semitic grammatical foundation. Dr. Zuckermann’s provocative use of the term “Israeli” is not meant to diminish the accomplishments of the revivalists. It’s simply meant to promote the study of this modern hybrid language as an independent entity that does not have to live up to the defunct standards of its ancient predecessor.

The establishment of the Va'ad HaLashon that became the Academy of the Hebrew Language, along with the publication of new Hebrew lexicons, helped lay the foundation for an improved understanding of Hebrew vocabulary. But one of the major challenges faced by the initial revivalists was the very slim attestation of Ancient Hebrew that was limited to a relatively small biblical corpus. In order to revive a new, modern form of spoken Hebrew, many new words that are not attested in the Bible had to be coined from scratch.

Hebrew Vocabulary Challenges

The estimated total number of Hebrew tokens that occur in the Old Testament ranges a great deal between scholarly sources. Dr. Ullendorff gives a rough estimate of about 300,000 tokens across about 23,000 Bible verses. The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew seems to use a more inclusive method of counting tokens, combining all the different corpuses of Classical Hebrew. Their estimate for Hebrew and Aramaic tokens in the Hebrew Bible comes out to 432,982. Extra-Biblical sources add an additional 100,000 tokens to Biblical Hebrew. These sources are the non-Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, the Wisdom of Ben Sira and the Hebrew inscriptions. This puts the attestation of Classical Hebrew above half a million tokens.

However, these numbers merely inform us how thick the Bible is, since 80% of these tokens come directly from the Hebrew Bible. Ullendorff estimates that out of those 300,000 tokens in the Hebrew Masoretic Text of the Bible, there are somewhere between 7,500 and 8,000 lemmas. This is close to Dr. Zuckermann’s more precise estimate of 8,679 lemmas, of which about a quarter of them (1,480) occur only once in the entire biblical corpus.

The technical term to describe these seemingly rare words is “hapax legomena,” or ἅπαξ λεγόμενα in Greek, which means, “once said”. Ullendorf suggests that these barely attested words were probably not that rare in everyday speech. But these “hapax legomena” are notoriously difficult for lexicographers to define given the limited context. And their translations are often disputed.

Ullendorf contrasts our limited knowledge of Hebrew vocabulary to the state of Arabic studies. In about 6,000 verses of the Quran, there are 77,934 total tokens. But in terms of Arabic lemmas found in the Quran, there are about 2,000; only a quarter of the attested lemmas in the Hebrew Bible. But an ordinary single-volume Arabic dictionary has about 20,000 unique entries. So, religious texts like the Quran and the Hebrew Bible only give us a small sample size from the spoken language as a whole. And this presents a challenge for Hebrew scholarship, because Israelite and Jewish society was centrally focused on writing and preservings texts in a narrow, religious genre.

Dr. Zuckermann cites the vocabulary size recorded in Mishnaic Hebrew at around 20,000 lemmas, which includes 8,000 lemmas not attested in the Bible, and 6,000 lemmas that are subsets of Biblical Hebrew. Medieval Hebrew adds over 6,000 lemmas to the language, while Modern Israeli has added about 17,000 new lemmas that were borrowed and coined from various sources to meet the needs of modern Israeli society. This puts the total vocabulary size of Israeli at around 60,000 lemmas, including foreign loanwords and technical terms.

Part III - A History of Greek

Pre-Greek

Now that we’ve explored the history of Hebrew, and reviewed some of the issues surrounding its minimal attestation within a limited genre, let’s survey the queen of ancient languages that is incredibly well attested throughout its history. It’s a living language with an unbroken chain of native speakers lasting nearly 4,000 years. I’m, of course, referring to Greek, a single-word designation that retroactively covers the entire spectrum of the language, even though there are a variety of confusing terms used to describe various forms of the language in different time periods. The proper Greek term for the language is Hellenic, which in Modern Greek is either Ἑλληνική or Ἑλληνικά.

This comprehensive timeline lists many of the most influential literary figures throughout the long history of Greek. Αnd it’s still not all inclusive. Starting from the beginning, we have to go all the way back to the Late Bronze age, several centuries before Hebrew emerged from Canaanite.

We refer to the earliest period of the Greek language in the Late Bronze Age as “Mycenaean”. Homer refers to these people as “Achaeans”. His use of the term “Hellenes” is in reference to a small tribe in Thessaly. The Mycenaean Greek period witnessed the collapse of the Minoan civilization centered on the island of Crete, precipitated by the eruption of the volcano on Thera. We have inscriptions going back to around the 18th and 17th centuries BC of whatever language the Minoans spoke, written in both pictographic hieroglyphs and in a script called Linear A, both of which are still undeciphered. We don’t know much about this Minoan language, aside from the fact that it was probably not Greek.

Prior to 1952, the Linear B script, discovered in Crete by Sir Arthur Evans, was also believed to be some non-Greek language. Then an architect named Michael Ventris deciphered it, and the classicist John Chadwick confirmed that it was, in fact, the earliest form of Greek. This discovery revealed that Greek was much more ancient than previously known. After that script seemingly fell out of use during the so-called “Greek Dark Ages,” the Greek language re-emerged in the historical record in a few different writing systems. The earliest form of the Greek alphabet we know today is attested in two famous inscriptions from the 8th century BC, which combined the consonants of the Phoenician script with an innovative system of vowels.

Archaic and Classical Greek

The Homeric Epics and the works of Hesiod are commonly dated around the time that the new Greek alphabet became dominant. This script is even attested in an inscription on the island of Crete, used for an undeciphered language called “Eteocretan” that was probably not Greek. It actually survived the Greek dark ages as a minority language. In fact, it may even be a descendant of the Minoan language.

The Archaic Greek Period preceded the Greco-Persian wars, which was right before what we call the Classical period, where there was an explosion in Greek writing in multiple regional dialects. The form of Greek that we call “Homeric” or “Epic” (found in the Iliad and the Odyssey) actually contains an amalgamation of Greek dialects, mainly Ionic and Aeolic. The dialect of the Attica region, in particular, grew to dominate the literary landscape centered in the city-state of Athens. It was in this period when the term “Hellas” (which we call “Greece”) began to refer to a universal, pan-Hellenic identity applied to the entire Greek-speaking world.

The term “Ancient Greek” is an imprecise umbrella term that often covers many historical periods of the Greek language. The boundaries of what’s considered “Ancient Greek” are a little shifty, since it can refer to the language used as far back as the Archaic period or sometimes even the Byzantine period. The term “Attic Greek” is often synonymous with “Classical Greek” due to the cultural dominance of Athens and the widespread prestige of its dialect. The formal version of Attic Greek is notorious for its deliberate grammatical complexity and ornate style. This forever cemented the perception that Attic was the standard by which all subsequent forms of literary Greek should be measured.

Additionally, you may encounter a term like “Post-Classical Greek,” which is an umbrella term that, as the name suggests, refers to Greek after the Classical age, including the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, which is where the terminology used to describe different forms of Greek over time becomes very confusing. As we’ll see, post-classical Greek is closely tied to the legacy of Classical Greek, which has always exuded a strong influence over formal varieties of the literary language.

Varieties of Hellenistic Greek

The end of the Classical period is aligned with the death of Alexander the Great, and the rise of the so-called “common dialect” of Hellenistic Greek that spread throughout the Mediterranean beginning in the 4th century BC. This popular hybrid dialect, sometimes called “common Attic,” was a simplified form of Attic Greek with some features from the Ionic dialect. It gradually replaced all the Greek dialects as a lingua franca; a standard means of communication for Greeks and non-Greeks alike.

Sometimes this Hellenistic “common dialect” is grouped in with Archaic and Classical Greek under the umbrella term “Ancient Greek”. But some scholars dispute that classification in order to distinguish the language of the Bible from its Classical predecessor. You may hear a variety of terms for Hellenistic Greek, such as “Septuagint Greek” or, more commonly, “New Testament Greek” or “Biblical Greek”. But these designations draw an artificial boundary around the language of the Bible, which the Biblical authors refer to simply as “Greek”. You may also encounter terms like “Alexandrian dialect,” or the term “Koiné,” which is the Greek word for “common,” short for “common dialect”.

The use of the term “Koiné Greek” requires a little unpacking. In the field of linguistics, a “Koiné Language” refers to a phenomenon called “koinéization,” where (as in Hellenistic Greek) a new standard form of a language emerges from the blending of multiple dialects of the same language; a process called “dialect leveling”. Scholars have popularized the reconstructed Ancient Greek pronunciation “koiné,” even though, in Modern Greek, it sounds like “kiní” (κοινή), which is short for Ελληνιστική Κοινή Διάλεκτος (Hellenistic Common Greek). This exact same term κοινή also refers to the “common” variety of Modern Greek (κοινή νεοελληνική). Nowadays Greeks often refer to their language in broad binary terms, like Ancient Greek and Modern Greek, emphasizing their language’s continuity over time.

One common misconception about so-called “Koiné Greek” is that it refers specifically to a monolithic vulgar language spoken by the “common” people throughout the Hellenistic world. However, the educated elite also embraced this “common dialect” as a literary language that was much more formal than the spoken vernacular that we find recorded in non-literary papyri.

The city of Alexandria was ground zero for the discipline of philology (the academic study of language). Grammarians from this period, associated with the Library of Alexandria, helped standardize “common” Greek. And the legacy of Classical Greek rhetoric persisted in the formal registers of the “common” dialect (a practice called “atticism”). This linguistic conservatism inspired writers throughout the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods to write in a formal style that emulated Attic Greek, even though such ornate language may fall somewhere along the spectrum of so-called “Koiné Greek”.

Early Greek Lexicography

Early on in the Hellenistic period a Greek grammarian named Philitas of Cos created the first known lexicon of Homeric Greek vocabulary, called “Disorderly Words”. This monolingual Greek glossary attests to the fact that, despite the persistent popularity of Homer, the Archaic Greek of Epic poetry was growing more remote and harder to understand after several centuries.

A generation after Philitas, Aristophanes of Byzantium, also continued the tradition of Greek lexicography. Aristophanes is most famous for his invention of Greek diacritics, a system of accent marks now called “polytonic script”. These diacritical marks attempted to preserve an older, more conservative pronunciation of Greek that was falling out of use in the Hellenistic period. This was a time of sweeping changes in Greek pronunciation, similar to the “great vowel shift” of Early Modern English. By the early Byzantine period multiple Greek vowels and vowel combinations were pronounced with the same ‘ee’ sound, a phenomenon called “ioatacism” or ιωτακισμός, which is now a feature of the standard pronunciation in Greece today.

After the early Hellenistic grammarians laid the foundation for Greek lexicography, a number of lexicons were produced over several generations that focused on defining difficult words from earlier Homeric and Classical Greek. Each lexicon was built upon prior scholarship. By the Byzantine period, Greek scholars with access to this rich tradition were able to compile encyclopedic lexicons that made a lasting impact on later scholarship. One particularly influential lexicon that hypothesized about the historical origins of Greek words, was called “Etymologicum Magnum”. It became the first Greek lexicon from the Byzantine period to be printed, first in 1499, followed by a reprint in 1848.

In reviewing the development of Greek lexicons after the printing age, it’s important to note that there are two bifurcating streams of tradition that were built on the legacy of Hellenistic and later Byzantine scholarship. There were lexicons focused narrowly on the language of the New Testament. And there were lexicons focused more broadly on Ancient Greek, casting a wider net across time. One groundbreaking lexicon with a very broad focus was the Thesaurus of the Greek Language, printed by Henricus Stephanus in five volumes in 1572. The term “thesaurus” comes from the Greek word for “treasure” (θησαυρός), emphasizing its comprehensive nature.

Henricus Stephanus (whose French name was “Henri Estienne”) used the same Latin moniker as his father, Robertus Stephanus. Stephanus senior was known for his 1550 edition of the Greek New Testament (the Editio Regia), which was a cornerstone in the Textus Receptus tradition behind the King James Bible. Stephanus junior published his father’s Thesaurus of the Latin Language in 1573 as a study aid to his own Greek thesaurus.

Modern Lexicography

In the late 18th century a German classicist named Johann Schneider recognized the need to distinguish the use of Greek in the New Testament from the Greek of Classical authors. This led him to publish two separate lexicons. One was the “Critical Greek-German Concise Dictionary,” which focused mainly on Classical Greek and non-biblical texts. His other work, a “Lexicon for the New Testament,” focused specifically on the Bible.

Another German scholar named Franz Passow expanded on Schneider’s general Greek dictionary with a German lexicon called the “Concise Dictionary of the Greek Language” in 1819. And it was Passow’s work that served as the basis for the most influential Greek-English lexicon of the 20th century, the Lidell-Scott-Jones or the LSJ, first published as Lidell-Scott in 1843.

Fun fact, the English author Lewis Carroll who published “Alice in Wonderland” in 1865, named his titular character after Alice Liddell; daughter of the dean of Christ Church, in Oxford, Henry Liddell. Henry co-authored the Greek-English Lexicon that bears his name, along with Robert Scott, an Oxford professor of Greek.

For the 9th edition in 1921, a scholar named Henry Stuart Jones was invited to join the project to assist in expanding the lexicon based on updated Greek scholarship. Jones’s contributions were so significant that his name was eventually added to the hyphenated title Liddell-Scott-Jones (or “LSJ”) in 1940. This edition is known as the “Great Scott”, which extended the coverage of the lexicon beyond Classical Greek texts. In 1968, Peter Glare published a Supplement to the LSJ through Oxford University Press, known as the OUP supplements, incorporating the latest discoveries of Greek papyri and inscriptions. John Chadwick, who was instrumental in deciphering the Linear B script, revised the Supplement in 1996, adding further corrections and updates. But he was still frustrated with the fundamental flaws of the LSJ. And he envisioned a better lexicon that would someday replace it.

New Classical Greek Lexicons

LSJ builds on the work of its predecessors with its strong focus on vocabulary from the Classical and Archaic Periods. It was a massive undertaking that covers a huge swath of Greek literature prior to the 2nd century AD. But it has limited coverage of Hellenistic and Christian literature, and can sometimes be misleading when used to interpret nuanced Hellenistic usage outside of its scope.

In the field of Classical Greek lexicography, several attempts have been made to produce a more up-to-date alternative to the LSJ. In 1995 Brill Publishers released a lexicon by an Italian scholar named Franco Montanari, who improved upon the issues he identified in the LSJ. He expanded its coverage of post-classical Greek, Christian literature, and late epic poetry, while also improving the layout of entries for contemporary users. Montanari’s work was adapted into English in 2015 as the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek.

And in 1994, John Chadwick, who had worked on the OUP supplements of the LSJ, wrote an article called “The Case for Replacing Liddell and Scott,” where he recommends improvements in the field of Greek lexicography. That article led to his book in 1997 called Lexicographica Graeca that railed against the LSJ for a number of flaws and errors. Chadwick meticulously documented incorrect etymologies, mishandling of Greek dialects and conflation of distinct word meanings. He even flagged issues with the 1968 OUP supplement. Chadwick illustrated that, since the LSJ builds on the work of several predecessors, many of its flaws are inherited from previous lexicons.

Chadwick’s vision for a new Greek lexicon was realized by Professor James Diggle, who, in 2021, completed the monumental Cambridge Greek Lexicon, which covers a narrow spectrum of Classical and post-Classical Greek authors, including some of the New Testament, but not the Septuagint. Other modern lexicons with narrow coverage (focused on a single author or corpus) include volumes such as Slater’s Lexicon to Pindar, Powell’s Lexicon to Herodotus and Lampe’s Patristic Greek Lexicon. And there are other specialized lexicons for niches like Homeric, Byzantine and Medieval Greek.

Biblical Greek Lexicons

This brings us to the other stream of tradition, where Greek lexicons were developed specifically for interpreting the New Testament. In the early 17th century, a German scholar named Georg Pasor produced a Greek-Latin lexicon focused narrowly on the vocabulary of the New Testament, which he recognized as distinct from other forms of Greek. Another early Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament was John Parkhust’s volume in 1769, which he based on the work of Pasor. This was followed by Edward Robinson’s volume in 1836, which he called a “dictionary”. It was based on Christian Wahl’s 1822 Greek-Latin lexicon, which was further updated by Christian Wilke in 1839.

Wilke’s Greek-Latin lexicon was the fountainhead of two separate streams of New Testament lexicons. The first stream started with Karl Grimm’s revision to Wilke, serving as the foundation for Joseph Thayer’s lexicon in 1886, which was revised in 1889. It was later integrated with Strong’s Concordance, a work from 1890 by James Strong that contained a glossary called the Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Greek Testament, which was an appendix to his concordance. A concordance is simply a list of words mapped onto the Bible verses where they can be found. His brief (and often inadequate) translations simply document the words used in the King James Bible, which are completely void of context in his dictionary. Strong explicitly mentioned that these translations were for those who “have not the wish or the ability to use a more copious lexicon,” which was likely a reference to Thayer’s lexicon.

Even though resources like Strong’s dictionary, Thayer’s lexicon and the LSJ are somewhat antiquated, their free status in the public domain makes them widely available online. However, there are more resources available to scholars, translators and even lay people.

BDAG Lexicon

Following the stream of New Testament lexicography that originated with Wilke’s 1839 Greek-Latin lexicon, a German scholar named Erwin Preuschen set a cornerstone in the tradition. His Greek-English lexicon was later revised by another German scholar named Walter Bauer. Bauer’s work was translated into English and substantially updated by a group of American scholars, starting with William Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich in 1957. Their revision was called “A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature”, attributed to the authors as Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich, or by the unfortunate acronym “BAG”. The second edition was published in 1979, which incorporated updates from Bauer's fifth German edition. It included substantial contributions from the classicist Frederick Danker, such as the addition of numerous references from contemporary scholarship and ancient texts. Danker worked closely with Gingrich to incorporate recent scholarly developments. He improved definitions and refined examples, resulting in the addition of his initial to the lexicon’s acronym: BAGD. The latest edition of the lexicon in 2000 is referred to by the rearranged acronym BDAG, listing Danker’s initial in second place to represent his substantial overhaul of the lexicon. He expanded and reorganized definitions and explanations of Greek terms, incorporating additional ancient sources from relevant non-Christian texts. Danker’s role as a pre-eminent lexicographer of Hellenistic Greek is cemented by his work on BDAG. But he was primarily a scholar of Classical Greek, who specialized in Homer, Pindar and the Greek tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles. And Danker’s predecessor F. Wilbur Gingrich was the head of a Classical Languages department until he retired. Their familiarity with older Greek prose certainly bolstered their overall proficiency in Greek. However, BDAG’s scope is intentionally limited to the Greek of the New Testament.

Expert linguist and Bible translator, Mike Aubrey, has written extensively on this topic, which I’ll link below. He notes key examples of the inadequacies of BDAG with respect to interpreting the broad spectrum of general, post-Classical Greek outside of the New Testament. Resources like LSJ and Brill are still quite useful, thanks to their broader coverage of non-Christian literature. But, unfortunately, all of these lexicons lack coverage of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the so-called Septuagint, which is only covered by a few specialized lexicons. So, there’s really no one-size-fits-all lexicon that covers all forms of Greek across time.

Digitizing Greek Texts

We already discussed the vocabulary sizes of English and Hebrew. We’re missing a lot of historical vocabulary for the English language, especially for Old English, even though it’s very well attested. And since Biblical Hebrew is relatively poorly attested, we’re likely missing a large portion of the vocabulary from the spoken language that simply wasn’t recorded in the restrictive genre of the Biblical corpus. But how do those numbers compare to a language like Greek that’s incredibly well attested across a vast period of time?

Stephanus’s Thesaurus managed to consolidate approximately 118,000 Greek lemmas in 1572. Stephanus was outdone in 1940 by the 9th edition of the LSJ with a total of 125,000 lemmas, which was boosted by about 20,000 more lemmas from the Oxford University Press supplements.

Beginning in the late 20th century and continuing to this day, there have been several projects focused on digitizing Greek texts. The first of these began in 1972 at the University of Irvine in California. Named after Stephanus’s famous work, the digital TLG database is not actually a lexicon like its namesake. It’s a digital archive of Greek texts with statistical analytics. The online version of the TLG was released in 2001. And in 2003 a search engine was developed that allowed users to select any word in the text and drill down to a dictionary entry from LSJ.

In 1987 Gregory Crane founded the The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, which integrated a digitizal edition of the LSJ in the year 2000. Today it also integrates digitized lexicons like Slater’s Pindar lexicon and the “Middle Liddell” lexicon. Its collection includes Greek and Roman texts, with a total of 13.5 million Greek tokens. And the new Perseus Scaife Viewer has 40 million Greek tokens. But this still pales in comparison to the word count of the TLG, which features the world’s largest collection of digitized Greek texts.

Statistics from the TLG Database

The TLG’s data analysis tools illustrate just how well attested the Greek language is. With a full subscription to the TLG (for $140 per year) you can get access to these tools yourself. Their statistics show that they’ve archived over 11,000 Greek documents that include about 126 million tokens, consisting of over 1.8 million unique wordforms (also called “morphemes”) and about 278,000 lemmas (or λήμματα). That reflects the total number of recorded Greek vocabulary throughout most of its long history. But it’s still not the whole picture.

TLG’s statistics are based largely on texts ranging in date from the Archaic period to the fall of Byzantium in the 15th century, with the highest portion of authors (345 of them, to be exact) coming from the Classical Period in the 4th century BC. And they’ve recently added more modern documents between the 16th and 20th centuries, which means that their data include vocabulary from almost the entire spectrum of Greek history.

We can see that the most frequently used wordform in all of Greek literature is the word θεοῦ, which is the genitive singular of the word for “god” (θεός). It occurs over 200,000 times in the database. Some of these instances may refer to a deity with a lower-case ‘g’ in polytheistic literature, and they include references to the monotheistic God with an upper-case ‘G’. The word has another commonly-used wordform when it’s a direct object in the accusative case: θεόν. That wordform occurs about 90,000 times. And when the TLG adds up all of the different forms of the word “god” and “gods” it arrives at 552,313. This is the total number of times the lemma for “god” (in all its forms) is referenced in the corpus. And here we see a ranking of the most popular words in the Greek language. Listed in the top three places, we find lemmas like λέγω (meaning, “say”) and πᾶς (meaning, “all”) and ἔχω (meaning, “have”).

So, what happens when we narrow the search criteria to a limited corpus like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey? Here we find nearly 200,000 tokens, consisting of nearly 30,000 unique forms and less than 10,000 lemmas. This number is much closer to the 8,000 lemmas found in the Hebrew Bible, since we’re dealing with a narrow corpus. Homer’s favorite word is “all,” which he uses a thousand times, mostly in the plural (πάντα or πάντες).

What if we shift to the Classical Period and take a look at well-preserved, prolific authors like Plato and Aristotle? Well, the Platonic corpus that survives has 42 documents with about 590,000 recorded tokens, with 50,000 wordforms and 13,000 lemmas, which is more than we have for Homer. Plato loved the word λέγω and used it over 8,000 times. And comparing Plato to Aristotle, we can see that there are 57 documents in the Aristotelian corpus with over a million tokens (nearly double the amount of Plato), including about 65,000 wordforms and 20,000 lemmas. Aristotle also loves the verbs “say” (λέγω) and “have” (ἔχω).

Consider how many more words have survived from Aristotle compared to Plato. Does that mean that Aristotle had a larger vocabulary, and that Plato would have needed a dictionary to read Aristotle? Probably not. Aristotle is simply better attested than Plato. Also, he wrote about a wider variety of subjects, so he had more opportunities to use a broader vocabulary.

What about the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible? The 59 documents that the TLG lists under the “Septuagint” include the Apocryphal books that aren’t in the Hebrew Masoretic Text. And this expansive corpus has about 623,000 tokens, with 47,000 wordforms and nearly 16,000 lemmas. That’s quite a bit more than the standard Hebrew Bible. And the most popular word in that whole corpus is “Lord,” which is used over 8,000 times.

Compare that to the canonical New Testament, with 27 documents, and we find about 137,000 tokens, with 18,000 wordforms and less than 7,000 lemmas. There the most common word is the verb “say,” followed by the capital-G God, which occurs about 1,300 times.

So, hypothetically, let’s pretend as if the New Testament were the only piece of Ancient Greek literature to survive from antiquity. We would have fewer surviving words than we have for Biblical Hebrew. The Greek language is a phenomenon because it is absurdly well-attested over the course of 3,000 years. Comparing its vocabulary with Hebrew is an invalid apples-to-oranges comparison. The reason we have so many more words in Greek, is because so much of its literature survives in so many genres. And we haven’t even talked much about Modern Greek.

Modern Greek in the TLG

The TLG database initially only included Ancient Greek texts. But it has recently expanded to incorporate more contemporary Greek literature. In 2013 it added the LBG Byzantine Lexicon by Erich Trapp. And in 2020 it added a Modern Greek dictionary from 1900 called “Collection of New Words”, by Stephanos Koumanoudes. The TLG has also included the work of several 19th-century scholars who wrote in a puristic form of Modern Greek. And very recently, in September 2024, it added the “Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek” by the Academy of Athens. However this foray into the modern period doesn’t provide complete, up-to-date coverage of the standard, vernacular language spoken today in Greece.

TLG’s most recent Greek texts include authors like Adamantios Korais (Αδαμάντιος Κοραής), Eugenios Voulgaris (Ευγένιος Βούλγαρης) and Neophytos Ducas (Νεόφυτος Δούκας), who were some of the leading figures in the so-called “revival” of the Greek language during the formative years of the new, independent Hellenic state. The term “revival” in this context refers to the attempted revival of Ancient Greek as a literary language, even though it was no longer spoken as anyone’s native tongue. In fact, the addition of the “Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek” to the TLG corpus only added about 1,000 lemmas to the database, which may indicate just how conservative the vocabulary is in these sources.

The Greek Language Question

In the 17th and 18th centuries, during a period known as the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment, an artificial variety of puristic Greek was invented by a group of educated elites. It was meant to be adopted by the general public as a literary language. These erudite men were native speakers of vernacular Greek, which was known by a variety of names like “Romeika” or “Simple Greek”. They were also highly proficient in Ancient Greek. They were tackling a fundamental problem facing the First Hellenic Republic, which was that, during the Ottoman occupation, the Greek language had developed into a variety of regional dialects; none of which were deemed suitable to serve as the official language for the new state.

Their solution was to synthesize a conservative hybrid language, combining features of Ancient and Modern Greek. Adamantios Korais was the chief architect of this artificial language he called καθαρεύουσα, meaning “purifying”. The earliest version of Katharevousa was developed and systematized by the father of philology in Greece, Georgios Chatzikakis of the Academy of Athens, who oversaw the publication of the Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek. This puristic form of Modern Greek stigmatized the natural development of vernacular Greek as a corruption of Ancient Greek. Katharevousa was engineered as a way to purge Modern Greek of Turkish loanwords and bootstrap it with “proper” Ancient Greek grammar and vocabulary.

As a result of the top-down imposition of Katharevousa, for nearly two centuries, Greek citizens lived in a state of diglossia, where schools taught the learnéd variety of Greek used in newspapers and official publications. Meanwhile, simple vernacular Greek served as the unofficial, spoken “folk” language, called Demotic (or Δημοτική). This situation is known officially as the “Greek language question,” a controversy that was mostly resolved by linguistic reforms implemented in the late 20th century.

Modern Greek Lexicography

Korais envisioned a prescriptive dictionary of ‘proper’ Greek that would help infuse the modern language with vocabulary from Ancient Greek, applying the lexicographical standards of western Europe.

He enlisted a scholar and Orthodox deacon named Anthimos Gazis to create such a dictionary based on the Greek-German lexicon by Johann Schneider, a personal acquaintance of Korais. Schneider’s lexicon was the basis of the lexicon underlying the LSJ. In this way, Greek scholarship that had flowed from Byzantium into western Europe during the enlightenment flowed back into post-revolutionary Greece. But Korais was not satisfied with the translations from German. And he attempted his own lexicon project that he never properly finished.

There were few advancements in lexicography in Greece prior to Korais’s efforts, aside from dictionaries that translated Modern Greek into Latin and sometimes Italian. The “demoticist” movement in the 20th century advocated for the institution of a new, informal language standard, which inspired the production of lexicons that laid the foundation for what would become Standard Modern Greek. The Academy of Athens produced its first “Historical Dictionary of the Greek Language” between 1908 and 1933, under the direction of Professor Hatzidakis, which was very recently added to the TLG database. As more foundational lexicons were released during the 20th century, colloquial Greek began to be standardized like other official European languages.

A linguist named Manolis Triandafyllidis was responsible for the Lexicon of Common Neohellenic. And the linguist Giorgos Babiniotis built on this foundation in his massive Lexicon of Modern Greek that includes over 125,000 lemmas. The new lexicon produced by the Academy of Athens features 75,000 lemmas. Much of Modern Greek vocabulary is inherited from Ancient Greek, especially the words injected into the language by the proponents of Katharevousa.

The Greek Language Question was ultimately decided by the emerging literary tradition of Modern Greek, driven by writers who, despite their affinity for Ancient Greek, envisioned a future where demotic Greek would be standardized as a pan-Hellenic common language. This timeline shows only some of the key literary figures (writers, poets and scholars) who laid the foundation of the language spoken today in Greece, Cyprus and in the Greek diaspora, drawing from an unbroken chain of native speakers over 3,000 years.

The linguistic reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s effectively abolished Katharevousa and established Standard Modern Greek on the basis of colloquial Demotic. It also replaced the polytonic writing system with a new monotonic script that relies on a single accent mark. But old habits die hard. Katharevousa has left an indelible mark on the vocabulary and grammar of formal, literary Modern Greek. Learning Standard Modern Greek as a foreign language requires wrestling with this tension on a regular basis, which makes it particularly useful for mastering Ancient Greek.

Conclusion

As we conclude this journey through the vast and complex history of lexicography, one challenge facing lexicographers becomes clear: the classification of different forms of the language in different periods can be messy. And languages like Greek and Hebrew can’t seem to get out of the shadow of their ancient predecessors due to their ongoing status as liturgical languages.

And even though we’re able to use databases to add up the total number of words in a language across time, no human being actually wields the full spectrum of historical vocabulary. A few thousand lemmas is usually enough vocabulary to get by in a living language. Children tend to master that vocabulary within the first few years of life.

Dictionaries and lexicons are only useful if they accurately define words in a specific context and in a specific time and place. The best resources for interpreting modern languages are dictionaries focused on modern usage. And the best resources for interpreting the languages of the Bible are modern lexicons focused primarily on biblical usage.

Resources like LSJ, Brill and Cambridge are excellent for Classical Greek, because they cast a wide net across multiple periods. But they may not always be useful at interpreting the Bible. And the free resources that are widely available online, like Strong’s Concordance, may not be as accurate and comprehensive as a more robust, up-to-date resource like BDAG, which is currently the gold standard for Biblical Greek.

As new discoveries advance the field of biblical studies and improve our collective understanding of ancient languages, resources available to translators continue to improve. Older translations need to be updated accordingly, taking advantage of this growing pool of resources, including digital databases and software.

Resources for learning the Biblical languages are easier to access than ever before. If you ever encounter dubious claims about the “true meaning” of an ancient text, be very skeptical when a novel translation is drastically out of sync with established translations. There is always some ambiguity in ancient languages. And a few passages are difficult, if not impossible, to translate accurately. But thanks to advancements in scholarship, it’s becoming easier to translate ancient texts into modern languages.

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