Using Blue Letter Bible

One of the my goals with this blog is help you connect with resources that deepen your understanding of the text. Blue Letter Bible is my favorite website for digging into the Hebrew and Greek words of the original text of the Bible and understanding what those words meant in their original context. Don't worry, you do not need to know Greek in order to learn a lot through this website.

I am much more familiar with Greek and will therefore probably use this website more often once we get to the New Testament. (FYI, the Old Testament is written in Hebrew, and the New Testament is written almost entirely in Greek.) However, I want to introduce you to the website now in case you are interested in exploring words from our readings now!

Head to Blue Letter Bible and enter the reference for the text you are studying. You can either enter just the name of the book of the Bible and chapter number, or you can also add the verse number. (I have added screen shots below to help you.) This time I am using BLB to look up John 15, because that is the gospel reading for this coming Sunday and the passage that I have been writing about for our church's Easter blog Living Into Joy.

Once you ask BLB to search for that text, you'll see that a screen comes up with the chapter, with each verse listed separately.

You'll see that in the 6 little boxes to the left of each verse, one is labeled "C." That "C" is for "Concordance." Here I am going to choose John 15:11, because I want to look up the word for "joy" in Greek, so I click on the "C" next to verse 11.

Now the verse expands to show me the verse in Greek at the top and then each word in English listed separately with the Greek word to its right along with the Greek word's Strong's Number. (Strong's is a Bible concordance that's been since 1890; Dr. Strong assigned each Greek word a number for reference purposes. If you're interested, you can learn about its history here.) To learn more about the Greek word, click on the Strong's number. For example, here I will click on the G5479.

Now a new page opens filled with information about this one word in Greek. It is listed in Greek at the very top in large letters, but then it shows its spelling in English and gives an audio file of its pronunciation. It also gives a detailed definition of how the word is used in the Bible under "Outline of Biblical Usage" and lists how many times the word is used in the New Testament.

If you keep scrolling down that same page, you'll find a listing of all the verses in which that word is used in the New Testament.

This is helpful because it saves you the time of looking up each verse either online or in your Bible. I often use this to get a sense of how the same word is used in different contexts across the New Testament, both to see how it's used in similar ways and in different ways.

If you ever wondered what a word meant in its original context, give BLB a whirl and see what you discover. If you have any questions about how to use BLB, please feel free to contact me.