How Words Work: Multiple possible meanings

Brock opened his eyes. His head was slumped onto a desk, which meant he was at school, and he had just been asleep. He straightened, pulling his head up through the fog. A teacher-ish person was looking at him with some impatience. He couldn't pull up her name. Or what class he was in. Not good.

"It's a one-word answer, Brock. You know this."

Uh-oh. She must have asked him a question while he was asleep. His mouth would have gone dry with panic if it hadn't already been dry from hanging open while he slept.

He looked around the classroom, trying to get some context for what kind of question it might have been. The room had some books, some desks, some kids, two windows--yes, everything pointed to this being a classroom, but that wasn't much help. There were some trees outside the window closest to him, but there are probably trees outside most windows in the world.

He tried to swallow calmly. He failed. The only option was to wing it. "Trunk," he whimpered.

The teacher sighed. "Yes. The trunk of a tree is where you can find its annual growth rings."

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"Trunk" is a good guess if you ever have to give a one-word answer with no context. It can refer to quite a few things in English: part of an elephant, a kind of box, part of a car, part of a human, part of fish, or part of a tree.

The same word can be used to refer to different things. Sometimes the distinctions are barely there; other times, like with "trunk," it's pretty obvious that there are multiple meanings, and you have to pick the right one based on the context. I don't know anyone who pictures elephants with boxes on their faces. We get it, right?

What if you didn't speak English, though?

I can't remember for sure, but I think it's Christmas Carol Kaufman's novel, Hidden Rainbow, that tells a story about an immigrant from Europe who found working in America really confusing. In the story, he says something like, "The foreman tells me to work fast, so I try to speed up, but then he tells me to hold a lever fast--how am I supposed to grip it quickly? I'm already holding onto it!"

Whenever you cross into an unfamiliar language, you'll run into this kind of thing.

In Matt. 5:8, there's a Greek word translated "pure" by most English translations, katharos. It's used 27 times in the New Testament, and it has two possible meanings.

1. Pure, without flaws or impurities
2. Clean, without any uncleanness. This can talk about being 
1. Physically clean (there's no dirt on whatever it is)
2. Morally clean (someone is not guilty)
3. Clean in terms of the Old Testament's clean/unclean laws (someone or something is ceremonially clean)

If I talk about a trunk, I only intend for you to think of one of the possible meanings. I'll let you know which one by the context.

In the same way, when katharos is used, it only means one of the possible meanings: pure or clean.

How do you know which one is right? Or in a case where a word has about 30 possible meanings, what do you do then? (Yes, there are words like that.)

You can usually trust English translations, because most translations were made by a group of scholars working together to do a really good job. If you look at 5 translations (for example, KJV, NASB, ESV, NIV, and HCSB), and all of them seem to understand it one way and not the other way, then scholars probably agree that one option is clearly better than the others.

If 5 translations disagree, there might be something complicated going on. Here are some of the things that might cause disagreement.

1. Some new Greek manuscripts may have been found, so scholars may have figured out there was a typo in what they were looking at before. If this were the case, I would expect older translations, like the KJV, to disagree with newer ones.
2. The word might only be used 1 or 2 times in the Bible. It's hard to tell what a word means if you can't see how it's used in different contexts. If you have a good all-purpose commentary (I like the NIV Application Commentary for most things), it will probably tell you if you're dealing with a rare word. The commentator will probably tell you the main things people think, then tell you why he/she thinks what he/she thinks.

The main thing to remember is that the author did not intend every possible meaning when they used the word.

If you pick up the Amplified Bible (AMP) and turn to Matt. 5:8, it looks like that translation mixes together the two possible meanings of katharos. The AMP expands "pure in heart" to mean, "those with integrity, moral courage, and godly character."

• "Integrity" is related to purity, right? Something that is integrated is consistent, and purity involves consistency, a lack of impurities.
• "Godly character" is related to being morally clean.
• "Moral courage" appears to have just been made up on the spot. It has nothing to do with katharos.

That's one of the dangers of using the AMP. It often doesn't distinguish between possible meanings, but just lists them all together. That can make it seem like all the possible meanings can all be what the author meant to communicate, and that's just not the way words work.


Helpful resources
Daniel Wallace (Greek textual scholar): "Choosing a Bible Translation." This free article talks about what to look for in a translation.

Philip Brown (Biblical theological scholar): "When the KJV and Modern Translations Disagree: What to Do."