Digging Deeper into Torah Series
When we study the Scriptures, we want to be as concise was possible in the sense that we are understanding the intent of the message. This becomes a little more difficult when we only use one language, which is a translation. It is important to understand for example, the Greek language is ranked as the richest in the world with 5 million words and 70 million word types! Greek roots are often used to coin new words for other languages, especially in medicine and the sciences. This illustrates how important it is to study the Greek text as there are many things the author may be implying by his choice of words. The English language on the other hand, Oxford English dictionary contains entries for 171,476 words, and Webster’s third edition contains 470,000 entries. This puts the English language as slightly more concise from the sense that the author is limited in the vocabulary that is available to express what he wants to say. The Hebrew language has a vocabulary of half a million, but only 8,700 words making its writing much more concise as compared to the English and Greek languages. The point is, when looking at the Hebrew text, there will be nuances in the text, in the way that it is written, that may draw out some very important concepts that may be lost in the translation. In this Torah series we will be looking closer at the Hebrew language and why it is so important to study the original languages.
