Hebrew and Greek: What the Original Languages Reveal About the Bible

The Bible is not a single book: it is a collection of books written at different times, contexts and by various authors — pastors, kings, prophets, fishermen and doctors — all connected by a central narrative: the story of redemption. This diversity of authors is also reflected in the diversity of languages.

The Old Testament was predominantly written in Hebrew, with some sections in Aramaic (such as parts of Daniel and Ezra). The New Testament was written in Koine Greek, the common language of the Mediterranean world in the first century. Understanding the culture, linguistic structure and historical context in which the Bible was written is essential to interpreting it faithfully.

Each of these languages has its own characteristics that shape thought and communication in ways that Portuguese simply does not replicate. In the following sections, we explore three concrete axes where this becomes more evident.

One of the most impactful discoveries for those who begin to study biblical languages is realizing that a single word can have opposite meanings depending on the context. This is not a flaw of ancient languages — it is a semantic richness that the translator must interpret before choosing an equivalent in Portuguese.

For example, in Hebrew, the vocabulary is relatively sparse compared to Greek or modern Portuguese. This means that a single verbal root can cover a broad semantic field, and the literary, historical and theological context is decisive in determining the correct meaning. When the translator chooses a word in Portuguese, he has already made an interpretive decision — and the reader who only has access to the translation does not know that there were other possibilities.

In the Greek of the New Testament, the phenomenon is different, but equally relevant: Greek has a much more extensive and precise vocabulary, with distinctions that Portuguese often collapses into a single word. The classic example are the Greek terms for "love" — ágape, philia and éros — each describing a distinct dimension of affection, but all translated as "love" in Portuguese.

In addition, the use of modern terms in translations may not correspond to the original meaning. A word that today has a technical, religious or philosophical connotation may have been used in the biblical text with a much more everyday meaning — or vice versa. Therefore, the study of the original language is crucial to clarify passages that seem ambiguous or contradictory in translations.

One of the deepest differences between biblical languages and Portuguese lies in how verbs function. This difference is not merely grammatical — it reveals how each culture organizes thought about time, reality, and action.

The Hebrew verb emphasizes the state. In Hebrew, the most fundamental verbal distinction is not between past, present, and future (as in Portuguese), but between complete and incomplete action — that is, between an already established state and a process still in progress. This means that when reading a Hebrew text, the central question is not "when did this happen?" but "is this completed or still unfolding?"

The Greek verb emphasizes the type of action. The New Testament's Koine Greek has a sophisticated system of verbal aspects: the same action can be described as punctual (happened at a moment), continuous (happening in a lasting way), or perfective (happened and its effects remain). This distinction — called verbal aspect — is often lost in translations, but it radically changes the meaning of central theological passages.

The Portuguese verb emphasizes the action itself. Our language organizes verbs mainly around time (past, present, future) and person (I, you, he). When we translate a Hebrew or Greek text into Portuguese, we are forced to make choices that the original did not require — and these choices can introduce subtle distortions in interpretation.

These structural differences explain why two translations of the same passage can seem to say different things, and why the study of the original grammar is so valuable for biblical interpretation.

The Gospels were written in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic — and probably also Hebrew in religious contexts. This raises an important historical question: were Jesus' words transmitted faithfully, or are the Gospels late literary creations that placed words in Jesus' mouth?

Linguistics offers a powerful answer to this question. The Gospel texts preserve Hebrew and Aramaic elements that do not make sense as inventions by Greek authors of the second or third century. These elements — idiomatic expressions, syntactic constructions, words directly transliterated from Aramaic — are marks of historical authenticity.

Some concrete examples:

• Aramaic words preserved in the Greek text: Expressions like Talitha koum ("little girl, get up," Mark 5:41) and Eloí, Eloí, lamá sabactâni ("My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?", Mark 15:34) were kept in Aramaic even in a text written in Greek. This indicates that the authors were preserving Jesus' original words, not inventing dialogues.

• Semitic syntactic constructions: Certain sentence structures in the Gospels follow Hebrew and Aramaic patterns, not literary Greek. A cultured Greek author of the second century would not write like this — unless he was faithfully translating a Semitic original.

• Idiomatic expressions without Greek equivalents: Some Gospel phrases only make full sense when one knows the underlying Semitic language. They "leak" through the Greek, revealing the original layer.

These linguistic elements refute the hypothesis of higher criticism that the Gospels are late literary creations, disconnected from Jesus' historical words. On the contrary: they indicate that Jesus' words were translated faithfully from Aramaic to Greek, and that the texts we have today preserve marks of this careful transmission.

The Bible describes that before the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel, there was "one lip and one type of words" — a single language common to all humanity. Modern research suggests that all known languages are related and derive from a single original language, although it is not known which current language resembles it.

Many theologians and Jewish and Christian scholars throughout history have believed that Hebrew was the original language of Paradise, spread after the Flood by the descendants of Eber. Other scholars, like Delitzsch, suggested that Aramaic or Syriac might be closer to the original language, especially since they were preserved in Babylon after the confusion of languages.

Regardless of this speculative question, what matters for biblical study is that Hebrew and Aramaic are Semitic languages with deeply different structures of thought from Indo-European languages like Greek and Portuguese. This difference is not an obstacle — it is a window to ways of understanding reality that enrich the reading of Scripture.

Studying the original languages does not diminish the authority of the Bible — on the contrary, it deepens respect for it. Biblical inspiration was not a mechanical dictation: it was a mysterious cooperation between God and the human authors, where the Holy Spirit guided the writers to transmit the divine message with fidelity, without canceling their personalities, styles and cultural contexts.

This means that the linguistic peculiarities of each author — the poetic vocabulary of Isaiah, the medical precision of Luke, the philosophical depth of John — are not noises to be filtered out, but part of the way God chose to reveal himself. Knowing the original languages is therefore a way of honoring the way God spoke.