Practice: A Word Study

To practice the skills you have learned in this lesson, do a word study on a word of interest to you, trying to avoid the word fallacies above. If you are thinking about working toward a badge, you may want to do your study on a word from the passage you observed in the previous lesson. We mentioned the Greek word teleios, which is often translated as “perfect.” If you want to see if your study produces the same results as the ones we informally mentioned above, you are welcome to do it.

Here are some tips on picking a word. Pick a word whose meaning seems ambiguous, possibly because it has more than one meaning. Pick a word that appears enough times to get a good sampling, but you probably don’t want to study one that appears so many times that the study would be unmanageable. 

Remember that you are studying a word, not a concept or a theology. A student once wanted to do a word study on the word impossible in Hebrews 6:18 because they wanted to know what it might mean for something to be impossible for God. The problem is that the meaning of the word impossible is “not possible.” The student was really interested in a theology question, not a word study question.

When you have completed your word study, upload it to the course using the option below.